A Country Road, A Tree (13 page)

“Do you know where they’ve taken him?” he asks.

She wipes her cheeks, blows out a breath, composes herself.

“Drancy. He’s been taken to Drancy.”

It’s on the edge of Paris. A nasty unfinished little housing project that they have looped around with wire.

“Have you seen him?”

“I went out there, but they wouldn’t let me see him.” She rolls her lips in, biting on them; her eyes brim. “But I have heard that he’s been tortured.”

“My God.”

She closes her eyes; tears run. She shakes her head. “He’s done nothing, he’s got nothing to confess. If he could give them something, if he had something to give, then perhaps—”

“Oh Lucie.”

She takes a breath, swipes away tears again, making an effort to still herself. She says, “He’s quite weak, I hear.”

“But you haven’t seen him?”

“No. There’s a woman. She told me.”

“Oh?”

“She lives out there, near the camp. It’s just a shell, that place; there’s no proper food, everyone’s ill. But she says that if I can get a food parcel together, she can get it to him.”

She pushes away a curl that has fallen loose. Her smile is brittle and it does not last.

“So that’s something,” she says.

He sits back. Blows out a long breath. Now, at last, there is something he can do.

—

The concierge peers at him, back again so soon. She is dark and squat and there is a fleshy growth on the side of her nose the size of a collar stud, which the eye snags on involuntarily; it must happen to her all the time because she doesn’t seem to take offence. She follows his passing with a blink and an upward tilt of the chin that he takes for approval. He’ll assume that she is decent. That’s all that can be required of anybody: decency. Everything else follows from that, or from its absence.

His knock is followed by a moment’s anxious pause. But then there is the clack of shoes on the parquet, and the door inches open and Lucie’s pale face appears again: anxiety melts into bafflement. She opens the door wide and goes to usher him in.

“I’m not stopping.” He holds up a grubby canvas shopping bag. “Just wanted to leave this.”

The bag is shaped by tins and packages. A baguette pokes grey-beige out of it. She looks at the bag, the bread, at him. She doesn’t move.

“Actually,” he says, and holds up a finger. “Two ticks. Suzanne will miss the bag.”

He pulls out the baguette and the pack of cigarettes, and a tin of anchovies and one of corned beef and a waxy block of cheese wrapped in paper. He passes the things to her, and she takes them off him to be helpful, filling her arms automatically, not yet really understanding.

He bundles up the bag and stuffs it into a trouser pocket. “I’m sorry it’s not more.”

The groceries are too much to hold—the baguette’s crushed under an arm, a tin is slipping. She tries to hand them back to him. He wafts the attempt away.

“They’re yours,” he says.

“No…”

“It’s for Paul; for the parcel.”

She shakes her head, a kaleidoscope shake, to make a pattern out of chaotic bits. “But. No. Because you need it yourself.”

“Get it to Paul.” He gives her an awkward pat. “I’ll see you soon, Lucie.”

He heads along the brown corridor and down the slow spiral of the wooden stairs, past the woman with the little button on the side of her nose, who, being decent, gives him a half-nod. He nods back and opens the door on to the street, the grey sky, Paris, straight on to the crunch of uniform boots and the skim of green-grey jerkins. He stands frozen. The soldiers pass as a chill in the air. When they are gone, he steps over the threshold, easing the little
porte cochère
shut behind him, and turns in the opposite direction, for no other reason than it is the opposite.

He only once looks back, when he comes to the corner. The street is void, as though the people have dripped through the gaps between the cobbles and oozed into the cracks between the paving stones.

His head swims; the street seesaws. His hand, when he reaches out for balance, has become his mother’s hand, crabbed and veined and shaking. He wants rillettes and cornichons, a boiled egg, a piece of bacon, a bowl of steaming moules. Bread and butter.

He leans back against the wall. He’s sweating. Cold.

A smoke.

A smoke will have to do.

He rifles for his cigarette packet, peers in at the remaining cigarette. Dry filaments of tobacco curl from the open end; the paper is ragged and softened. He looks at it for a long time. He touches it with a fingertip. Then he slips the packet back into his pocket. He pushes away from the wall and begins his long walk home.

—

“Here’s something you never see any more,” she says.

He rolls his head round on the pillow to look at her, eyebrows raised.

“Spoiled fruit,” she says.

He studies her profile, the soft nap of her skin. Despite the lines at her eyes, there’s still something of the girl about her, even now, even in the middle of all this, with her hair all fallen anyhow, and her gaze vague and turned towards the ceiling and her thoughts freewheeling and ravenous.

He wets cracked lips. “True.”

“Or vegetables.”

He nods.

“Because you’d see it all the time, wouldn’t you, on a market day. There’d be bruised apples that’d rolled off a barrow. Or oranges, on the cobbles, burst open, wasps on them; kids would kick them around. Sometimes you’d see an old fellow, a
clochard
would be picking them up, stuffing them in his pockets. Fallen fruit, all bruised and gritty.”

“I remember.”

“But you never see that any more.”

“No.”

“Or the tramps, for that matter.”

“No.”

“They’re all gone too.” She considers this a moment. “The days when you could pick up an orange off the street, can you imagine? God, I’d love an orange. Even if I had to fight the wasps for it.”

“Or the tramps.”

She smiles. Her teeth show. Her gums are pale.

“A bad orange is really bad, though,” he says. “I’d take a bad apple over a bad orange, any day.”

“Depends how bad.”

A long pause, in which both of them consider the relative merits of spoiled fruit. Then: “No one feeds the pigeons any more.”

“One might, if one thought it might get one close enough to catch it.”

A moment passes, and then she says, “Pigeon pie. I could eat a pigeon pie, couldn’t you? With potatoes in it, and carrots.” She still stares up at the ceiling. Her lips compress, her chin crumples.

“Potatoes aren’t rationed yet,” he says.

“But you can’t get hold of them anyway.”

“Or carrots, or radishes, or turnips, they’re not rationed.”

“I know.”

A silence.

“It will be all right…,” he says.

She doesn’t roll her eyes. But she can’t stop herself from expelling a huff of breath, almost a sigh, and twisting her head round on the pillow to give him a long look.

“I’m not that bothered anyway,” he says. He wets his lips again. There’s a sharp catch on the tongue there, and a taste of blood where the skin has split. His voice is dry too, and sounds dusty when he speaks.

“I don’t expect you…,” he says. “Just because I…”

She does roll her eyes now. Heaves up on to an elbow, the better to glare at him.

“That’s not how it works,” she says. “Of course that’s not how it works. You know that. I’m not going to stuff myself with bread while all you’ve got to eat is turnips.”

After a moment, he says, “Lucie was desperate.”

She blinks, sighs, flops back down on her pillow. “I know.” Then she says, “I keep thinking of omelettes. What I’d give for a mushroom omelette. The kind where the mushrooms are cooked almost black and there’s that inky juice seeping out of it, and the eggs are a bit crisp on the outside, but still soft and oozy in the middle. You might get the mushrooms, if you were lucky, but where would you get the eggs for it now?”

“A gorgonzola sandwich,” he says.

She nods keenly, as though this is a particularly insightful observation. After a moment, she says, “We are in real trouble now, you realize.”

“But what else could I do?”

She parts her lips, is going to speak, because there are a few valid responses to this. But then he starts to cough. And doesn’t stop. He heaves himself up, away from her, his legs swung over the side of the bed, and he is curled over like a C, his backbone a line of knuckles, his belly hollow and his chest heaving. His scar slides and strains over his ribs; it’s livid against his white skin. Suzanne fumbles him a handkerchief and shifts round next to him, her hand on his back. He clutches the handkerchief to his lips. Gradually the fit subsides and he manages a shaking breath. He wipes his eyes.

“Sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I just need a cigarette.”

She rubs his back. “I know.” They don’t have any cigarettes. “I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

“Have we got any tea?”

“I think we’ve got a little left.”

“Thank you.”

“Rest.”

He eases himself back down as she gets up off the bed. She pads her way down to the tiny kitchen, and lifts tins from the cupboard, and puts the water on to heat. He lies and looks up at the ceiling, his breath raw.

The way it nails one to one’s body, this dearth. A battle to think about anything at all beyond the discomforts of the flesh, a battle to do anything more than attempt to deal with its demands. Which is, presumably, intentional. A canny weapon, hunger, the way it turns one in on oneself.

“It’ll get better,” Suzanne says. She hands him a cup of pale and milkless liquid. He shifts up on his pillows to take it from her.

“Shamrock tea,” he says.

“How’s that?”

“It’s got three leaves in it.”

She smiles.

“What you’re doing,” she says. “For the Léons. I am proud of you.”

He looks up at her. She strokes his shoulder, her hand cold over gooseflesh, her expression grave.

“But remember, you, yourself, you matter too.”

—

The plane leaves are starting to turn and so are the maples, and a leaf drifts down, because nobody has told the trees that the world has ended. The children’s Monday-afternoon voices twine into a thread as they walk in their shabby trails from school, ink-stained and bedraggled, their satchels swinging in the low September sun, because whatever children are used to is how things ought to be. Today, with its golden sun and its crisp air, brings thoughts of beginnings, of pencil shavings and new leather and ink on a fresh page, and this is cruel, because even if you could manage somehow not to notice, if you could skim over the posters and assure yourself they only advertise nightclubs and radio sets and soap, if you took off your glasses so that the boarded shop-fronts were just a blur, and the outrages daubed there were rendered soft and indistinct, and if you could step through the empty spaces in the street where there should be actual people, and do it without shivering, then all might seem almost to be well, and fresh, and hopeful. But the tumour’s already threaded into the flesh. It taints the blood, it poisons everything.

He taps lightly on the Pérons’ door.

“Alfy. Good afternoon.”

“What’s wrong?”

Where to start. He jerks his head. “Come for a drink?”

Alfy glances back into the apartment, calls out to his wife, “Back in a few instants,
chérie,
” and a reply is heard, though the words are indistinct. Alfy grabs a jacket and ushers him out.

They walk briskly; they talk about the new academic year and some of the boys Alfy’s teaching, because of course Mathematics and French and Philosophy still go on, just as the leaves turn and fall and the earth spins round the sun. There are, of course, changes to the curriculum. Books are disappearing from the library. At the corner café they sit on the terrace. They lean in, heads together. The sun catches in their beer; it glows golden, cloudy.

“Do you know about Paul?”

Alfy glances round the nearby tables. An old lady in hat and fur coat on such a day is sipping crème de menthe, a small dog at her feet.

“Yes,” Alfy says. “I heard.”

“The idea of him. That civil, decent man. The very idea.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to find out. What I can do.”

“For Paul?” Alfy says. “Maybe an appeal, if he is unwell…Perhaps his wife…”

He sips. He places the glass back on the table. He resists the compulsion to down the beer in one go. The urge is for calories, not alcohol. His hand shakes with it.

He says, “Actually, I wondered what I can do at all. I thought you might be able to help me.”

Alfy lifts his glass, drinks, and sets the beer back down again. When he speaks next it is in a dimmer tone. “Why would you think that I would know?”

A bead of water runs through the condensation on his glass like a ladder in a stocking. “I had rather gathered…I was under the impression that you…” He wafts away the ineffectual words. “I’m just sitting on my hands here. Tell me how I can help.”

Alfy looks off along the street, then down at his glass.

“There’s someone you need to meet.”

Alfy waves to a waiter, gets out his wallet. “These are on me.”

He teases out a five-hundred-franc note and tucks it into the bill. His fingertips linger longer than necessary; he taps twice, drawing attention to the banknote and the red ink printed on it. Somebody has typed three words on to the note. They are clear and unequivocal, and as the note circulates the words will pass from hand to hand, day after day, for weeks and months to come. Reminding, reiterating, asserting, saying what simply must be said and yet cannot. The words are
V
IVE LA
F
RANCE
.

He looks up, eyes widening. Alfy’s expression is more than usually innocent; he wears that disarming half-smile of his.

“Petty vandals.” He shrugs. “What can one do? One has to pass it on; one can’t simply throw five hundred francs away.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

PARIS

September 1941

A woman gazes at them with large catlike eyes, blinks. He nods at her, rifling for her name, for where he knows her from. That stocky fellow with a moustache: he’s also familiar. And that tall queenly woman.
Germaine,
he thinks,
Hélène
and
Legrand.
In fact, glancing round the knots of people as he moves through the lobby and the reception rooms of Mary’s house, he begins to suspect that he knows everybody here, more or less. All are friends, or friends of friends, have been nodded to in galleries and at concerts and at gatherings like this down the years. He hasn’t seen so many acquaintances in one place since before the
Exode.
If it were not for the making-do worn-shiny clothes, the gaunt faces, he could almost believe that this was a different September, an earlier light.