Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Epigraph
Cooldrinagh: Spring 1919
Part One: The End
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two: Purgatory
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Three: Beginning
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Jo Baker
Copyright
Longbourn
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
61–63 Uxbridge Road,
London W5 5SA
www.penguin.co.uk
Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by
Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published
2017
Copyright © Jo Baker 2015
Jo Baker has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448170524
ISBN 9780552779524
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
‘When some went out, others lit up.’
Molloy, Samuel Beckett
THE TREE STIRRED and the sound of the needles was sshh, sshh, sshh. The boy swung a knee over the branch, heaved himself up, and shifted round so that his legs dangled. The scent of the larch cleared his head, so that everything seemed sharp and clear as glass. He could still hear the faint sound of piano practice, but he could also see out across the fields from here; he could see for miles and miles, and the sky was wide open as a cat’s yawn.
He heard the side door of the house, and then her voice go calling out for him, sing-song: ‘It’s ti–ime.’
He chewed his lip and stayed put. The door propped open, he could hear more distinctly the bright ripple of music, a stumble, and the phrase caught and begun again. Frank was trying hard to get it right. He, though, would not oblige. With her watching, he couldn’t lose himself while playing; and if he couldn’t lose himself, then what was the point of playing at all?
‘I’m wai–ting.’
He didn’t move. She gave out a sigh and the door clacked shut behind her, and she came down the step, out into the garden, looking for him.
He dug at a scale of bark with a thumbnail.
‘Where have you got to now, you wee skitter?’
But it was herself that she was talking to as she marched through the garden, searching him out. He shuffled in against the trunk, wrapped an arm tight around it.
He watched her pass under his dangling tennis shoes – the white dividing line of the parting in her hair, her skirt snapping out with her stride. Her feet moved like darting arrows, pointing the way. The wrong way, but she wasn’t going to give up on it. If she were to stop, and plant her feet and crane her head back, that would be that. But it didn’t cross her mind: he simply couldn’t be where he was not allowed to be. Up there, he had climbed out of her imagining.
The music ended. Frank had finished the piece. He was waiting to be excused.
She was out across the lawns now, and there was just the spiral stair of larch branches down towards the brown earth, the mat of fallen needles, and the sound of her voice, calling again and fading round the far side of the house.
He waited until he heard her footsteps return, and then the click and clack as she opened the side door and shut it again behind her. A moment later and the music started up again. Poor old Frank, he’d been lumbered with it; Frank was paying for his little brother’s escape.
He too would pay for it, he knew, and in spades, when she found him; his mother had a strong arm. But for now, he had disappeared, and it was a miracle.
He shuffled forward on the bough, tweaking the legs of his shorts down, one and then the other, between the rough bark and the tender backs-of-knees. Gravity tugged at him now, teased at his core, making it lurch and swoop. A bird was singing somewhere – a blackbird, pouring its song up and out into the Easter air.
He sucked in a breath. It tasted of sap, and of spring, and of his rubbery tennis shoes. He let go of the branch; he let go of the trunk. He lifted his arms and spread them wide. The pause on the cusp, the brink. He dived out into the empty air.
Gravity snatched him. Air stuffed his mouth and ballooned his shirt and his shorts and pummelled him, and it was stacked with branches and they smacked and scurried past; twigs whipped his cheeks and legs and arms and belly and tore at his shirt.
The ground slammed up. It knocked the breath out of him, knocked the light out of him. Made him still.
He lay, his cheek on hard earth. No breath: empty, red and pulsing, and no breath. Gaping, but no breath; then, in front of his eyes, the dust stirred and the fallen needles shifted: he dragged in a lump of air and heaved it down him, and then pushed it out again. It hurt.
He felt too a hot pulse in his hand, a burn on his thigh: he noticed these particular discomforts, alongside the tenderness of bruised ribs and the hard weight of the earth pushing up against him.
He creaked up on to hands and knees as his breath became normal again. Then he sat back on his heels and brushed the needles off his palms. After a moment, he twisted himself round to stretch out his legs. He considered the scratch across the ball of his thumb, which was not so bad after all, and another on his thigh, which wasn’t bleeding much, and the pink bald patch where an old scab had come off a knee. He licked the ooze off his hand, tasting not just blood but the salt-sweetness of unwashed skin and medicinal pine. He brushed down his shins and tied a trailing lace. Then he eased himself upright, unfolding like a deckchair, all angles and joints. He tugged his shorts straight, and they more or less covered up the scratch on his leg, so she wouldn’t notice that.
His head swam, just a bit. But he was all right.
He looked over to the house: the windows stared straight back at him. The music laboured on. No doors were flung open, no one came thundering out to grab him by the scruff and drag him in and thrash his backside blue for doing something so very dangerous indeed, for putting himself in harm’s way, for risking life and limb, when it had been impressed upon him so soundly not to do such an idiotic thing again. She must be standing over the piano, her stare flicking from Frank’s hands to the score, the score to his hands, making sure that Frank, at least, was going to get something right.
And knowing the piece, he knew he had a good while yet before Frank would be done with it.
He glanced up through the helix of branches to the sky, where clouds bundled and tore towards the mountains from the sea. On the lowest branch, near the trunk, the bark was polished smooth with the wear of his own hands. He reached for it, grasped it in his stinging palms, and heaved himself up till his elbows locked and his belly was pressed against the bough. Then he swung his right knee over the scaly bark, making the blood bead again. He stretched a hand up for the next branch, where it hung just above his head. He began, again, to climb.
This time, this time, this time, he would skim up to join the clouds. This time, he would fly.
HIS STOMACH IS oily and heaving. His hand shakes and there’s a mean little headache between his eyes. The sun, slanting in through the harbour window, catches in the cut glass and kicks off the silverware. It makes him wince. Everyone else has already breakfasted, and what’s left has gone quite cold.
‘Shall I ring for more bacon?’
He shakes his head; it hurts.
The drink always seems necessary; it seems like the solution. That certainty fades with the actual drinking; he drinks himself into disgust, and now, a few parched and sleepless hours later, he’s prickling with it, sweating whiskey, scraping butter across cold toast and swallowing sour spit while she watches every movement, notes every flicker. She seems to scent it off him, the whiskey and the misery. It makes her scratch at him and scrabble round for solutions.
‘Eggs? Would you take some eggs?’ Half-getting up: ‘I’ll have Lily fry some for you.’
He speaks too quickly, over the heave of nausea. ‘No. Thank you.’
She sits back down. ‘Well, you have to eat something.’
He bites the corner off his toast, sets the remainder back down. He chews and swallows. He is eating.
‘I mean something substantial. Something with some nourishment in it. Not just toast.’
‘I like toast.’
‘You eat like a bird. Are you ill? You’re not ill.’
Eating like a heron or a puffin or a gannet: all that stabbing, scooping, struggling and gulping; eating like an eagle or a hawk that smashes its prey into the ground and tears it into messes. Owls swallow their dinners whole and cough up boluses of bones and fur. He picks apart his toast and eats a fragment: is he eating like a penguin, perhaps?
Something lands hard overhead: a hairbrush or a shoe hitting the floor above. He flinches but doesn’t look up, while she, distracted for a moment, peers at the cracks in the ceiling, and her face softens. There are voices, a clattering of footsteps. A door slams.
‘They’ll bring the whole place down around our ears.’
It is precarious, this little rented house by the harbour, with its rattling windows and fireplaces that smoke. So she stuffs the rooms with guests, to keep the walls from buckling in, to stop the roof from collapsing down on top of her. Sheila and Mollie, his cousins; Sheila’s girls, Jill and Diana: all the daughters that his mother didn’t have. And she won’t hear of them leaving, however old the season grows. The cold winds do not blow. The summer will not end. There are no clouds.
‘Those girls.’ She smiles and shakes her head.
He swallows down another bit of toast; she pours herself a cup of milky coffee. A slick drip gathers on the lip of the pot and they both watch it fall. He is just about to push away his chair when she looks up and says, ‘Oh, I saw a friend of yours the other day in town. Lovely boy. Medical man. Can’t for the life of me remember his name, now. He would have been a couple of years below you at Portora.’
He knows who she means. ‘That would be Alan Thompson, I’d imagine.’
‘Ah yes. Doctor Thompson, that was it. He’s doing very well.’
‘So I believe.’
And had been a pale frog in the peat waters of the Erne; in whispering huddles in the library, cricket whites, a naughty caught-red-handed smile. Later, in the middle of the medic crowd at Trinity, crossing the quad in a gaggle with wine bottles and a whiff of cigars. Always seemed to be at the centre of things, to simply know how to be. Encountered since and drunk with; helpful, when help had been needed. A good man.
He lifts the skin off his coffee, a greasy caul, and drapes it into his saucer. He shouldn’t do it to her, but: ‘Unless it was his brother Geoffrey,’ he says.
She folds her lips. Geoffrey is a psychiatrist. ‘I’m not sure that I would consider that medicine.’
But it is a palliative. I do sleep sometimes now, he thinks of saying. I can breathe: air comes in and out of me as required. You might consider that a good. You might think it money well spent. Is that not medicine, after all?
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Good for their old mam; she must be very proud.’
He lifts the little silver lid on the marmalade and picks the spoon out of the jar.
‘Were you getting anything . . . written, in Paris?’ she asks.
He watches the marmalade drip. It is thin and slides off the spoon like spittle. He feels her discomfort and her desire. Could he not, for once, write something respectable, something that she could leave out for her visitors to admire? He sets the spoon back in the pot, fits the little silver lid back into place around it.
‘No,’ he says. ‘Nothing much.’
‘Well then, you may as well stay here.’
He looks up at her strong-boned face, its feathering lines. ‘Is that right?’
‘You’ll get so much more done here, with us to look after you. You can write those articles for the paper. I know Paris is cheap, but that’s no real help at all if it just encourages you to be spendthrift; if your allowance—’
He goes still. She has become accomplished at this. The incision is precise, as is the pause.
‘—if you can’t live reasonably well on your allowance there, and there are too many distractions from your writing, then there is nothing for it but to stay here. For your own good.’
And be begrudged. As if he were not keenly enough aware that the food he eats, and the air he breathes, and the water – and the whiskey – that he drinks, that the space he takes up in the world is most dreadfully squandered.
‘If nothing else, you could help your brother in the business.’
‘He wouldn’t thank me for it.’
‘He could do with the assistance.’
‘The last time I got involved, I made a right hames of things. Frank can do without that kind of trouble.’
This makes her wince, as if it tastes sour.
‘I know that if you would just make the effort, if you would exert yourself, if you would . . .;’ She trails off. ‘You did so well at the College. Everybody said.’
Having arrived at that, she must be almost done.
‘I’m sorry, Mother.’ His long, lean frame unfolds, the chair shunting backwards.
‘Where are you going?’ she asks.
‘Fresh air.’
‘Sure, you haven’t finished your breakfast.’
‘I’ve had enough, thank you.’
He is followed from the room by the sound of her long, deflating breath; his shoulders rise at it.
But quietly, alone, surrounded by the meal’s debris, with the sound of young voices from the upstairs rooms, she presses at her eyes. It is just all so sketchy, so insubstantial, the way that he is living; it’s all hand-to-mouth and day-to-day. That crowd in Paris: she doesn’t know the half of it, she suspects, and, really, she doesn’t want to know. But the sight of him in that hospital bed, his chest in bandages, the nurses jabbering away in French: she blinks, her eyes wet. When she thinks what he could have been. Her brilliant, beautiful boy. Throwing it away, just throwing it away. Until he has the heart turned sideways in her.
Because it doesn’t even make him happy, does it? If he could just be happy.
The girls thunder down the stairs into the hallway to greet their almost-uncle; his voice is warm and cheery in reply. A glimpse of him at a distance. Of why he must always be leaving.
All shiny buckled shoes and neat cardigans, Jill and Diana are to take themselves out for the morning. He feels seedy and liverish and guilty; the two of them are so glossy and clear-skinned and lovely, and full of skittish energy, like ponies.
‘Oh, hang on two ticks,’ he says.
He fishes out coins, drops a clutch into cupped palms. ‘Get yourselves some toffees.’
‘Gosh, thanks!’
He follows as they clip down the front steps into the street. They are chattering, gleeful, sounding so English; they will stride along the seaside pavements, heads together, past the folded papers in racks, the honesty boxes and the crates of apples and plums and tomatoes; in the sweetshop the shelves are cheerful with jars of pastel bonbons, chalky mints, glossy toffees, boiled sweets like stained-glass windows. They’ll slaver and suck and crunch on the quayside, watch the boats lean in the wind, the waves jostle, hear the rigging slap. He feels solicitous for these moments, their accretion. That they be strung together like beads on a thread, to be counted through in later times.
He leaves them to it, turns the other way along the beach, the stones shifting and sliding underfoot, his narrow Italian boots useless for this, for anything more challenging than urban flags and cobbles. He follows a belt of rotting seaweed for the slippery comfort of it, stalking along like a wading bird, ungainly and in a hurry. Striding up through seakale now and bleached-out thrift, all its little heads tossing in the wind. He follows a worn bare line in the salt-grass that takes him up towards the road and the last houses of the town. The sun is low. The shadows are long. The wind comes bundling down from the mountains.
Ahead lies the little graveyard. The gate draws him over and he pauses at it. You can see this spot from his mother’s window. She could be watching him right now: like a figure in a Seghers landscape, rendered insect by the bulk of the mountainside.
They lined the grave with turf and moss. He and his mother, working together. As though they were making a garden. As though they were planting a seed.
His father had always been his companion in this, striding out from the old house, Cooldrinagh, the two of them marching along the suburban streets, and then country lanes, and then scrambling up through the heath, till they reached a point, only so far away and no further, the limits of the wound-out thread. They would sit, and scuff up stones, and pluck at cotton-grass and stare.
And then his father would say, ‘She’ll be wondering where we are.’
And they’d heave to their feet and begin the long trudge that would bring them down and round and back and all the way to the grey box of home. Not Ariadne’s thread. Nothing so gossamer as that. Sinewy, this pull she has, and tough.
And now he is alone, and his father planted in a trough of moss, and nothing grew from it at all except the ache of missing him. He turns away from the gate and walks on. The lane climbs between fields, shaded by high hedges that drip with fuchsia like blood, and every bit of gravel is felt through his boot soles as he goes, and sheep call and gulls weave and hang overhead.
He swings over a gate and out into the open ground beyond: gorse rattles its seed pods in the wind and his own breath rattles in his chest, and with exertion now the scar pulls. But he carries on and up through the grey scabs of limestone, and as he reaches the crest the ground falls away to reveal the sweep of the coastline beyond, the fungal growth of suburbs crawling up towards the rust-grey city. To the left, the mountains swell, and the wind pummels down from there and snatches at his jacket and makes his eyes water. He turns his back on it and blinks out towards the wrinkled slate-grey sea, and the old world that lies beyond it.
. . .; You hear the grating roar
of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling . . .;
But you don’t, do you? Not from here: there’s just the wind, and his own blood pulsing and the rasp of his own breath. The sea far below mouths silently; a sly lick towards the town, the graveyard, the roots of this dark hill. And over there, out over the horizon, beyond that wedge of Britain and deep into the expanse of Europe, a tidal wave is gathering, and any moment now will come the tipping point, the collapse and rush, the race towards destruction.
He turns to pick out the rooftop, the particular skirl of smoke, where his mother waits by the fire and looks at seed catalogues and can’t bear to have the radio on.
He knows he cannot stay. He can’t help Frank. He can’t write articles to order for the Irish Times. Sleep would fail him; he would drink to calm the shake in his hands, to soften the thud of his heart. Soon it would be a conscious effort to breathe at all. There had been nights, and even days, before he went to Paris, when he would have unwrapped a new razorblade and neatly opened his wrists and had done with it all, if it were not for the mess that he’d leave behind him. The bloodstains on the floor. Her outraged grief.
He will have to tell her that he’s going, though he cannot tell her this.
He tugs his cuffs down straight. He pushes the glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. He begins the inevitable lope back down towards the precarious little town, to all the things that can’t be said.
‘Will you be joining us, May?’ Sheila asks.
His mother’s reply from the dining room is a deal more soft than it would have been, had it been he that asked.
‘I am fine here, thank you.’
Bent into the smell of hot dust and electricals, he twists the dial through squeals and fuzz until he catches and settles on the signal from the BBC in London. He goes to lean against the sideboard, arms folded.
Sheila sits herself down; Mollie perches on the arm of her chair.
‘Where are the girls?’ he asks.
‘Still out,’ Sheila says.
The three of them gathered here know what’s coming, more or less; they know how the pieces stand on the board. The broadcast begins, and the British Prime Minister speaks, in his precise, quavering way, from London. They each stare at the carpet, each lost in the darkness of the transmission.
This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note . . .;
There is movement outside the open door. His mother stands there, in profile. Behind her Lily holds the dishes, halted by the gravity of the moment: the moment that has been drawing everything towards it now for years.
. . .; by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.
His mother raises a hand to her mouth.
I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
Sheila sits back at this; Mollie rubs her arms. His mother reaches for the door frame. Chamberlain’s voice continues to spool out from the wireless and tangle on the floor.
‘Well, there we are now,’ Mollie says.
Sheila reaches for her sister and their hands clasp. His mother still stands in the doorway, hand to the jamb. Her face has gone grey. He pushes himself upright, crosses the room to her. He takes her hand and slips it through his arm.
‘Here,’ he says. He brings her over to her armchair. She is trembling.
He switches the radio set off. Then there is just the little parlour, and the morning sunshine through the window, and the sea wind blustering, and you could tell yourself that nothing had changed, but these words have changed the world.
The girls, though, their cardigans ballooning, their hair blown into tats. They’ll be huddled on a bench to finish up their lemon bonbons, coltsfoot rock, liquorice; they are still free from it. They’re a gorgeous empty spell of wind and hair and sweetness.
‘Can I get you something?’ he asks.
His mother shakes her head.
He glances over at Sheila – pink cheeks, pink nose, a smile forced over a dimpling chin – and even as he watches, her smile thins, her lips pressed tight and trembling, and she turns to her sister and crumples into her.
‘Buck up now, darling,’ Mollie says, rubbing her arm. ‘Don’t spoil your face.’
After a moment, Sheila sniffs and nods and leans away, and dabs at her eyes with the flank of a hand. Because the girls must not see that she’s upset.
‘I’ll have to see about an earlier crossing,’ she says.
His mother blinks up now. ‘Whatever for?’
‘We must get back, May.’
‘No, indeed you must not. You heard what he said – there’s to be another war. You’ll be much safer here.’
Sheila straightens her shoulders, touches her hair back into place. ‘You are so kind, May, dear, but you know, the children will want their father. Donald has to join his regiment, and we shall want to see him first.’
‘Well, Mollie,’ May now says. ‘You’ll stay.’
Mollie makes an apologetic moue. ‘A little while, May, but then I’m afraid I shall have to go too.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Work. They’re expecting me.’
May is left with nothing now but to turn her face away and be silent. She must swallow it down in one hard lump, this unpalatable truth that everyone has been chewing on for months. They may not like it either, but at least they have grown accustomed to the taste.
He lays a hand on her shoulder. He feels the bones of her. She turns her sharp blue eyes on him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘This is hardly your fault.’
From that frozen moment, the household stillness breaks into a cascade. Voices bounce and spin around the place like spilled ball bearings. Stairs are hammered up and down. Telephone calls are placed, timetables consulted, sketched-out plans become solid and concrete.
Lily turns out the hot press for the girls’ balled-up socks and folded vests and blouses; Sheila and Mollie discuss – at varying distances and volumes – the need for this item or that, the possible location of the other. Where are the girls’ good shoes? (They’re wearing them – which becomes evident on their return, all tangled hair and stickiness, dustily shod.) What about these books? Have you seen the hairbrush? Whose hairbrush? My hairbrush, the tortoiseshell hairbrush. Is this the one you mean? Feet clomp back and forth across the landing and up and down the stairs, then the voices become softer, closer, as the work begins to come together and be set in order.
He stays out of their way; he can’t be of any help. His head still hurts; he’s liverish; he’s wary of questions, doesn’t want to share his plans. He hides behind his book.
When they are done and the taxi is ordered, he carries the luggage downstairs and lines it up in the hall, the girls’ neat little cases and their mother’s larger one. Everybody waits, since that is all there is left to do now, the girls sitting side by side on the upright hall chairs, one set of white socks and buckle-shoes dangling and swinging slightly, the other set neatly instep-to-instep on the parquet, their owner made grown up by the gravity of the day.
Time stretches and slows; the clock ticks. Mollie expresses concern about the taxi. May is worried about the weather: they’ll have a rough crossing ahead of them, she dares say. They cannot say anything worth saying, but that does not stop them talking, and the soft words accumulate, like sand trickling through an hourglass. They are up to their knees in it and yet still they can’t stop.
Then there’s the sound of a car bumbling along the harbour road, which makes conversation break and scatter.
‘Is that—’
‘Ah, that must be—’
‘Have you got—’
The motor idles in front of the house. Sheila has the front door open; the driver gets out of the cab and comes to help with the luggage.
The girls smell of wool and boiled milk and soap, when they are kissed; they are solemn and excited, knowing this is all so very serious now; their cheeks are hot against his cheek, and they smell no doubt his guilty adult reek of cigarettes and sweat and last night’s whiskey.
Sheila hugs him sudden and hard. Words fail him.
‘God bless you, dear boy.’
He manages, ‘God bless.’
And then Sheila slides in beside the girls, who shunt themselves across to make room, and the door slams on them, and the driver gets in the front seat, and the car turns and moves away, grinding alongside the slate-blue harbour water.
He goes indoors. He lights a cigarette. ‘Boy’ is right. Child. Bear-cub that the dam didn’t bother licking into shape.
The house feels dim and cold. A limestone pebble has been left on the hall console. It’s greyish, skin-smooth and about the size of a peppermint. It had sat in the girl’s creased and grubby palm, revealed to him like a secret that she knew he would keep, then tucked away again with a little gappy smile. Abandoned now, forgotten, its meaning shed. He lifts the stone. It’s cool to the touch. He cups it in his palm a moment, and then he slips his hand into his pocket and drops the stone in there.
He lopes along like a broken-down hound at Mollie’s side. Mollie has taken his arm to tether him to her pace. Her body is compact and soft in her Irish tweeds. It is a glorious afternoon, breezy and blue, a mockery, the low sun making them squint.
‘So are you going to tell me?’ she asks him.
He peers down at her. ‘Tell you what?’
‘Ach, come on now. Sheila and I could see it straight off.’
‘See what?’
‘Who’s the girl?’
Her arm hooked through his, they stumble on together. He says nothing. Seagulls wheel overhead; waves suck and spit.
‘Come on, spill the beans.’ She tugs his arm.
‘What makes you think there are beans to spill?’
‘You know what you’re like. Left to yourself, you’re a liability. You get ill; you get thin; you even got stabbed, for goodness’ sake! You can’t take care of yourself, can you? But look at you.’ She stops and drags him round to face her. ‘Just look at you.’ Rosy-cheeked in the wind, she studies him. ‘You’re clearly being taken care of.’ She peers in closer, frowns. She flicks the back of her hand against his chest. ‘Somebody has fixed a tear in that shirt.’
He peers down. His lips twitch. Then he offers Mollie his arm again; she takes it and they walk on.
‘There’s a girl,’ he says.
‘I know.’
He doesn’t offer anything more, holds a smile at bay.
‘And . . .;?’
He shrugs.
‘Ach, come on!’
He smiles. He says, ‘Years ago, we used to play tennis, mixed doubles, when I was at the École Normale. But I didn’t see her again until last year, after the attack. She read a report in the newspaper and remembered me. She came to the hospital and, well, that’s when.’
‘That’s when you fell in love.’
It is to be supposed so. He does not confirm, correct or contradict.
‘She made curtains for my flat.’
Mollie laughs.
‘They’re actually quite fine.’
‘Sorry. I’m sure they’re beautiful . . .;’ She waves a hand. ‘I didn’t mean – I just never thought of you – being the fellow that you are, I didn’t think you’d care about things like that.’
‘I didn’t say I cared. But when it gets dark,’ he says, ‘one has a need of curtains.’
That’s what Suzanne had said, anyway, lying naked on the tangled sheets, looking out through the high window of the sleeping loft, her dark hair tumbled, moonlight on her skin. He’d agreed, but had determined that on no account would he ever get any; if there were curtains then they would lie together in pitch black, and that would be a shameful waste of her nakedness.
And then, when she had presented him with curtains, he’d thanked her, and had even participated in their hanging.
‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’
‘I’m just happy for you. Thrilled. That you’ve got a nice girl who’ll mend your shirts and make you curtains.’
‘That’s not all she is. She’s a musician. She studied at the Conservatoire. She is a writer, too. She writes.’
‘God help you then, the pair of you.’
The curtains are drawn that evening in the little house, even though it’s not yet dark. The radio crackles and shrieks as he hunts out the BBC again. When it’s tuned in, he goes to stand beside his mother, a hand resting on the back of her armchair. She has steeled herself to listen now.
At the back of her head, grey hair frizzes out from its pins. Her old hands clutch the armrests. Mollie is huddled in the seat opposite, her legs drawn up underneath her, chewing on a nail. Lily stands by the sideboard, included but separate, eyes downcast.
At five o’clock today, France declared war on Germany.
His mother fumbles a hand upwards. He takes it. It is cold. They listen to the continuing bulletin, but little of it sinks in. Because the pieces are all in play now, are moving out across the board. He strokes the back of her hand with his thumb. One traces the possibilities out from here and ends up – where? Wire and trenches, is that what is coming all over again? He could volunteer for the ambulance corps, grind an old taxi over mud . . .; Back in France, could he enlist? It is all so grim. His head buzzes as though the lid has been taken off a jar of flies. His mother twists round in her seat and looks up at him. Her hand grips tight and she pulls him down a little closer.
‘Well, that’s that,’ she says.
He nods. That is indeed, as she says, that.
‘You can’t go back now.’
He looks down at her face, the sharp angles, the lines of it. But he can’t stay. ‘I’ve told everyone I will be back.’
‘Everyone?’
‘All my friends.’
‘Your friends.’
He nods.
She looks at him for a long moment, her throat in an uncomfortable twist. Those shady, disreputable people with their unimaginable lives, they are drawing him away from her. From security and comfort and a decent life.
‘And what possible use,’ she asks, ‘do you imagine you would be?’
IT’S RIDICULOUS TO be happy now, Suzanne thinks. It’s outrageous. But she can’t help it.
She slips her arm through his. He shortens his stride for her, and this synchronization makes her smile. She breathes the warmth of tobacco and shaving soap and wine. Their footfalls clip across the Place Saint-Michel. The two of them are heading out in the hope that the cheap little café on the rue de la Huchette will have held its nerve and still be open, even though so many of the fancier bistros are battened down and shuttered now.
He didn’t have to come back. But here he is. Shoulder, throat, jaw and cheekbone, blue eyes following the passage of a car along the street. She leans in against him, and all is well.
In the morning, she slips out of his bed and into her clothes and out into the streets, threading through the bin men and the delivery boys and the market traders, back towards her own apartment and out of his way. There is a gauze of mist lying in the air and Paris is new again, and beautiful, after years of going almost unnoticed.
He has his work and it is important: she must not get under his feet. She has her own work to go to anyway, those fruitless hours with plump children in the bourgeois quartiers, plonking away on pianos that are far too good for them and of which she finds herself feeling jealous. She keeps her quiet hours alone in her own apartment too – she is finishing a new jacket, with little bone buttons, in anticipation of the colder weather to come. She goes to the market and she goes to the library; she takes herself off to see her friends. She keeps busy. She measures out her company carefully. A drop here, a drop there. She won’t make a nuisance of herself.
Whenever she goes to see him, she brings small comforts with her. A pastry to share, a bar of chocolate, some small item of needlework to soften the edges of his austerity. In the little kitchenette, there is usually only coffee and dust. She wants to make him comfortable. More comfortable than he can make himself.
The pale and wounded Irish man, his chest in bandages, strapped down by hospital sheets. She has been trying to make him comfortable ever since.
Nothing happens.
Late September days soften and cool and Paris is still lovely. The children walk in crocodiles in the street; confined for the day, their voices hang round school buildings in a haze: passers-by walk through clouds of rhyme and times tables, into billows of song.
There is a radio in the apartment next door; at the weekend, the thumping left-hand rhythm of popular songs, waves of laughter, jazz leak through the wall. The neighbour’s baby cries.
Someone comes to wrap the street lamps in blue paper; at night the cars go by half blinded with blackout strips. The rue de Vaugirard becomes a deep-blue river. It washes past his own backwater, the rue des Favorites. He closes the shutters, draws the blinds and lights a lamp, and pours just a drop of Jameson’s for himself, because it must be made to last. He settles into a book, or into his work, into the translation of Murphy into French.
Suzanne comes and goes. She twists her treacle-coloured hair back and stabs it with pins and throws him a brilliant smile. He’s always startled by that smile, as though a ball has dropped out of clear air and landed smack into his palm. The thing is, of course, to lob it back into play, but he’s often a fraction too late; she’s tidying away the newspapers, she’s heading to the kitchen, plumping up a cushion, she’s half gone already. But he knows she’s wanting something. It’s as though there is a cat around his ankles, silky and twining, but making him anticipate a stumble, expecting to do inadvertent harm.
He tries for her. He sets coffee warming on the gas ring, spreads rillettes on bread, fishes cornichons from the jar.
They eat in bed, their feet slipping together. She brushes shards of crust from the sheet. Her limbs are brown from the summer, her breasts and belly white where her swimming suit covered her; before he came to France he’d never seen a body patched like this, in a slow sepia exposure. Running a hand along her back, from tan to white to tan again, he feels grateful. She lifts her cup and sips her coffee. He turns away to hide his face. No point pinning this with words. Let it flutter by.
She goes with him to the Irish Legation, because his status here must be sorted out once and for all. And if you want to get something done, she says, ask a busy woman. She walks with him to the Place Vendôme through the drifting plane leaves, and she takes his arm. They pass the Opéra. It has gone dark. The building is shut up and locked tight, the windows shuttered, the gates wrapped in chains.
‘Oh,’ he says.
‘We’ll go back,’ she says, pulling him close, ‘when they reopen.’
‘You think they’ll reopen?’
‘Of course they will,’ she says. ‘Eventually.’
Inside, the Legation is all polished wood and marble and dust-motes drifting in shafts of autumn sun. They join the back of a stationary queue. The Irish voices here, the conversations, tangle the air and make him breathless. He keeps his mouth shut, eyes down, to avoid the inevitable small-country connections, the friends of friends and cousins of cousins that there inevitably are in such places.
‘I’m sorry, I – but you wish to remain?’
The clerk is a bluish-pale boy he has not dealt with before.
‘Yes.’
‘The two of you. Mr and Mrs . . .’
‘No.’
‘But. Well.’
He watches the clerk’s expression, the questions that are not being asked. Why stay? What good will it do you staying here?
‘We are processing exit permits right now . . .’ The clerk looks at him a moment longer, then frowns down at the passport, picks through the pages; he purses his lips, peers up again. ‘Just let me, um.’ He gets up unevenly from his desk, shuffles some documents together, tucks the passport in alongside them. ‘I won’t be a moment . . .’
And they’re left standing there at the desk together, in the light from high windows, with the smell of beeswax and tobacco smoke and with a parched, half-curled plane leaf at his foot that has tumbled in along with them. Her mouth twists up with impatience.
After a while, the clerk returns and hands the passport back. ‘He says you’ll need a certificate confirming your profession. That, along with your passport, should be sufficient for you to be granted leave to remain in Paris. Under the current dispensation.’
‘How does he get one of these certificates?’ Suzanne asks in her brittle English.
‘By applying to us.’
She opens her lips. The clerk forestalls her: ‘We need a formal letter of application. With references.’
‘How long will it take to process once you have the letter?’
‘I can’t say. We have a good deal on our plates here at the moment.’
He nods, pockets his passport. ‘Right,’ he says. Then, ‘Thank you.’
They turn away, and Suzanne tuts and shakes her head.
Outside, the wind blundering around the Place Vendôme has a new chill to it. He offers Suzanne his arm and she takes it, and they walk along, huddled together against the cold.
‘When we get back, you must write to your publisher. They will send references. They will say what you are.’
‘I shall,’ he says, though he does not feel the confidence that this suggests.
‘And then you will be in good standing here at last.’
He nods. ‘I hope.’
The words, in French, do not sound quite so unlikely, so uncomfortable. J’espère.
In the Tuileries Gardens, fallen leaves bundle across the gravel. The dust, as they walk, whitens their shoes.
He writes his letter of application; he writes with some discomfort to London to request a brief reference from Mr Read at Routledge. He stamps the envelope and sends it. It seems dreadfully importune of him. As though he is asking the man to take part in a deception on his behalf.
But nothing happens.
Or rather, things keep on happening, but to other people. Nothing happens to him.
When he heads out for morning bread, there’s a green van standing by the kerb on the rue des Favorites. It’s the type of vehicle that the locals call a panier à salade. You get packed in, shaken up and spun round in them. They are police vans.
His shoulders stiffen. He does not have his papers yet.
But it’s next door. He sees the porte cochère shoved open and a flic stepping over the sill on to the pavement, and a young man stumbling after, his dark hair rumpled and his shirt misbuttoned, straight from bed. A second policeman comes after them. People stop, stand back, so as not to become entangled. He finds himself amongst the bystanders, watching, without ever having meant to watch.
The young man gets into the back of the vehicle, looking baffled and angry; the door is shut on him; the officers get in too, one in the back, one in the front, and the van rumbles away over the cobbles, and that is that.
‘Who was it?’ a woman asks near by.
‘Foreigner.’
‘What has he done?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Where will they take him?’
Another woman leans past him to answer; he smells her breath. ‘The Préfecture, the Santé, maybe.’
‘Seems a shame, doesn’t it?’
‘It’s what they’d get up to, left to themselves, isn’t that it?’
He keeps his own mouth shut. And he does nothing. It all seems at one remove from him, untouchable: someone has been lifted clean out of the everyday. And from that moment on, these people become ubiquitous, unmissable: the shabby-smart, the hounded, the dispossessed. When overheard, their accents vary, but there is a definite type: educated, thoughtful, softly spoken, terrified. They are the jetsam of half a dozen different nations; they’re fragile and exhausted. They’ve been washed up here by the floods at home.
Sometimes, like bus drivers raising a hand to each other in passing, he sees the moments when they notice each other: there is an uneasy snag and tear of the gaze, an urge for companionship, but an undertow of fear. Who would want to be associated with, who would want to belong to this community of un-belonging?
The autumn is gentle at the start, and things go on as normal, more or less. He tries to work, to make it matter that he be here. He plays a bit of tennis with Alfred Péron; they meet at cafés or the Pérons’ apartment to work on his translation. Mania greets him warmly and does not seem to mind Alfy wasting all this time on his Irish friend. Alfy has become a trusted companion in futility. They inchworm through the text of Murphy, sipping coffee or wine, smoke spooling round them, deep in the problem of turning his own particular English into his own particular French. There is about as much point to this as there is to the completion of a crossword puzzle: there is from time to time the pleasing shift and click of a problem solved, but that’s the sum of it. Once they’re done, all they’ll have achieved, he suspects, is a book that, having gone unread in English, can now go equally unread in French.
The heating still functions; there’s still hot water when he turns the tap and scrapes a razor; in the day the lift still churns up and down; there’s still the sound of the neighbours’ wireless set coming through the wall, tuned to Le Poste Parisien, and now and again that baby cries. He’d like to see Joyce, go out drinking with him, lose himself in the wash of booze and talk, but the Joyces are all out of town, and then they’re back again, and then they are away, and though a message is left it has not yet been returned, and it’s impossible to keep track of them.
‘The sheets need washing,’ Suzanne says.
‘I know.’
‘They’re starting to smell.’
‘I know.’
‘They feel greasy to me.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think the line will hold?’
Her thigh over his thigh, her hand on his chest, his scar underneath her thumb a purplish, ragged line: this damaged man is also the boy she recalls in tennis whites, starfished for a ball. The space between those moments sometimes seems just a tick, a tock. Sometimes it seems vast.
‘What?’ he asks, but he had heard her.
‘Do you think the line will hold?’ she asks again.
He rolls away and fumbles for a cigarette. He had been thinking, by association with the sheets, washing line, seen linen billow and snap. But she means Maginot. ‘I have no idea.’
‘They put too much faith in it,’ she says. ‘I think.’
‘I daresay.’
‘The generals go on as though it’s the answer to everything. For them it’s the last war all over again. But it’s not the same war, is it? So that damned line is not the answer.’
He lights up the cigarette, draws on it, then offers it to her. ‘It might be the same war. More or less.’
‘Times have changed,’ she says. ‘Things have moved on, haven’t they? The world goes faster now. The war will too.’
He watches as she takes a sip of smoke. Her lips, with the dip of a seagull in flight.
Over a cloud of outbreath, she says, ‘They’ll go round, won’t they? Load up in their Volkswagens and just motor on through.’ A pause. ‘Perhaps you should have stayed in Ireland.’
He blinks at her, then rolls his head away and looks up at the ceiling, where a cobweb trails in the draught. He is not necessary here, though here is necessary to him. ‘Do you think so?’
‘It won’t go on like this for ever, nothing happening. It won’t last. The drôle de guerre. It’ll stop being funny soon enough.’
‘It’s not really funny now.’
‘The Legation would help you if you were to leave.’
Mr and Mrs, the clerk had said.
‘I can hardly breathe back there in Ireland. I certainly can’t write.’
‘Well then.’ Eyebrows up, lips pursed. ‘You must stay, whatever comes.’
He takes the cigarette back and smokes it.
She sits up, swings her legs out of the bed. ‘If I strip the bedclothes,’ she says, ‘would you take the sheets down to the pressing?’
Two streets away from the apartment, on the Place Falguière, one of those strays asks him politely for the time; he stops, consults his watch, tips it towards the other fellow, who nods. He also offers a cigarette. Eager thanks; a match is struck; he offers out the flame: the old man dips his head towards it.
To the rusty crown of a once-black bowler hat, he says, ‘You’re not from round here, are you?’
The old man looks up at him from under the brim, made wary. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Your accent.’
‘You’ve got quite an accent there yourself.’
‘It’s not me that worries me.’
The old fellow grins, reveals quite the worst teeth he’s ever seen. ‘Maybe it should be, my friend.’ A phlegmy sound, which might be a chuckle. ‘We’re all dangerous, we’re all contaminated. We’re all sales métèques as far as they’re concerned. And if they lock you up now, when those Nazi lads get here you’re dinner. Kaput.’
He baulks at the hard words, casually used: dirty foreigners. ‘I’ll have my papers soon.’ His own voice sounds confident.
The old man lets smoke go, touches a thread of tobacco from his pale tongue, wistful. ‘I had papers once.’