A Country Road, a Tree Read online

  ALSO BY JO BAKER

  Longbourn

  The Undertow

  The Telling

  The Mermaid’s Child

  Offcomer

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2016 by Jo Baker

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2016 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Great Britain by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  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.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Baker, Jo, author

  A country road, a tree / Jo Baker.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-345-81638-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-81640-5

  I. Title.

  PR6102.A57C69 2016 823'.92 C2015-907003-1

  Jacket design adapted from an original by Stephanie Ross

  Jacket images: (front) photograph © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works. Colourization by Dana Keller. (back pattern) flickr.com / Bergen Public Library collection

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Jo Baker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Cooldrinagh

  Part One: The End

  Chapter One: Greystones

  Chapter Two: Paris

  Chapter Three: Paris

  Chapter Four: L’exode

  Chapter Five: Arcachon

  Chapter Six: Paris

  Chapter Seven: Paris

  Chapter Eight: Paris

  Chapter Nine: Paris

  Part Two: Purgatory

  Chapter Ten: Paris

  Chapter Eleven: En Route

  Chapter Twelve: Crossing

  Chapter Thirteen: Roussillon

  Chapter Fourteen: La Croix

  Chapter Fifteen: The Vaucluse

  Chapter Sixteen: The Vaucluse

  Chapter Seventeen: La Croix

  Part Three: Beginning

  Chapter Eighteen: New Place, Foxrock

  Chapter Nineteen: Normandy

  Chapter Twenty: Paris

  Chapter Twenty-one: Normandy

  Chapter Twenty-two: Paris

  Author’s Note

  A Note About the Author

  When some went out, others lit up.

  —Samuel Beckett, Molloy

  COOLDRINAGH

  Spring 1919

  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 go, and then her voice 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 onto 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.

  Part One

  The End

  CHAPTER ONE

  GREYSTONES

  County Wicklow

  September 1939

  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 backward.

&nbs
p; “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.