A Country Road, a Tree

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.

“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 sea kale 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 upward. 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?”

CHAPTER TWO PARIS, Autumn 1939

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.”

“You don’t any more?”

The old fellow shakes his head. “All obsolete; all gone.”

“Can you get new ones?”

“There’s nobody left to grant me them. I have no country now; no rights. No one will hear me.”

“Oh God.”

The old man nods, drags again on the cigarette and it crumbles to a coal. He lets out an appreciative huff of smoke.

The urge to assist is visceral…the oldest hath borne most…but what can he do? This is massive and abstract and there is no way to get even a fingernail into it. He peers into the cigarette packet, shakes it, taps: there are three cigarettes left.

“Here.” He hands the packet over. He waves aside the thanks.

The old fellow fumbles the pack away before the offer can be retracted. “God bless you, sir.”

“God bless you.”

He turns away, rounding the corner on to rue d’Alleray, chewing at the inside of his cheek. The weather’s turning; it’s getting cold. Things can only get worse. His fingertips find the round limestone pebble from the shore at Greystones, smooth and cool as a mint between his fingertips. He lifts the stone and slips it between his lips. He watches his feet swing out ahead of him in his scuffed-up, exhausted boots, and sucks on the stone, while music rises and swells inside his head, the sad loveliness of the Winterreise.

Wundlicher Alter!

Sol lich mit dir geh’n?

He has an answer for his mother now, at least: no use whatsoever.

CHAPTER THREE PARIS, Winter 1939–40

Alfy is made strange by uniform, his flesh somehow transfigured, made more solid; his kepi rests on the café table, between the half-empty glasses, beside the half-full ashtray. His fingers play with a coaster, a cigarette smokes between his knuckles. He keeps his voice low and his eyes averted, as if he is himself abashed by his new state, by the thick green greatcoat around his barrel body. He is doing what he can do. He has enlisted. The professor will be shovelling out the stables for the cavalry.

Cavalry. It makes his eyes fall shut, his head shake in slow negation, just to hear it, just to think of it, obsolescent, an insane word for a modern war. For dear Christ’s sake: cavalry. It may as well be Calvary, for the sacrifice and slaughter that shadow it.

“I wanted to ask you,” Alfy’s saying. “While I’m gone, if you could keep an eye out for the family, for Mania and the boys.”

“Of course.”

“I know,” Alfy says. “I know you would anyway. I just needed to say the words. And if I don’t come back…”

“Ah God now, Alfy, don’t.”

“Because it doesn’t look good, if we are to be honest about it.” Alfy tilts his head, taps his ash into the ashtray. “So. If I don’t come back…”

“Alfy, no—”

“Consider them family, would you? Mania and the boys. That’s all I wanted to say. Would you do that for me, if I don’t come back?”

“Of course. Count on it. But do me a favour too.”

“Anything, my friend.”

“Come back.”

Alfy flashes his big grin; they part with a hand clasp, a kiss on the cheek. At the street corner he glances back at the stocky, uniformed figure, and his throat aches at the parting.

Alfred, his old friend, his new brother, leaves for his regiment; he, though, returns to his notebooks, to his desk, this pointless, circular work. Maybe he should try to enlist. He could shovel dung as well as anyone. It would be more worthwhile than this.

—

His friends drift.

Rootless anyway, the winds make hay with them; they are bundled up and off, tumbling and in disarray. They come and go; you wouldn’t know where anyone would be.

The Joyces are back, James and Nora arriving at the station in a noisy huddle cluttered round with bags and cases. Both he and Paul Léon are there to meet them, to help, but still it is all short temper and frayed nerves, bloody-mindedness and frailty. Mr. Joyce with his smouldering cheroot and his stick and his dark glasses, questions for Léon about what’s going on with Giorgio, enquiries about books: the man is entirely disengaged from the moment and its imperatives. Nora’s complaining is a constant exhalation like the steam engine. They have been in Brittany to make arrangements for their daughter, to see her settled out of harm’s way. Though whether harm’s way can ever be quite avoided by Lucia is uncertain, since she carries so much harm around inside herself.

Léon goes in search of a porter and they head towards the cabs. Following the bickering couple, his own face flushes at the recollection of fractured, thwarted Lucia. His blunt failure at love.

He and Paul get them settled in the cab and then return across the concourse, heading for the Métro.

“They are to pack up the apartment, do you know?” Paul says. “Nora insists on an hotel.”

Paul is so benign, so mild, and yet there is a sweet one-upmanship to this; an almost-schoolboy I know something you don’t know.

“Switzerland, then,” he says, expecting to annoy.

“It’s an obvious choice, isn’t it? They could both get the proper treatment there — the father and the daughter. Perhaps the situation is not all bad, since it will force the issue for them.”

They’re approaching the entrance to the Métro; he glances round at Paul’s milk-smooth face, its gentle intelligence. That his admiration for James Joyce extends to this — that a benefit to the family could add a hint of silver to the thundercloud of war. They descend the steps, and their boots clip allegro down the worn wooden treads. Paul’s are the same style as his, he sees, though shiny still, and stiff; there’s a flinch to his walk.

“New boots?” he asks. “Do they pinch?”

“Still wearing them in.”

“Mine wear out before I can wear them in.”

They step in parallel from the bottom tread on to the tiled floor, and their boots swing along together. Joyce’s favouring of the style has made them popular.

Paul says, confiding: “Oh, my feet, good God.”

—

Not everyone is in transit. Mary Reynolds stays on in her house in the rue Hallé; she and Marcel Duchamp have their gatherings still; they have cards and conversation. Parties still happen. In one room, a wall is painted dark blue and stuck with pins and a tracery of string; her globe stands smooth in the shadows. There are maps and books and paintings and bright fires, and with the conversation and the glass of fine and the little dishes of olives, you would think this was for ever; you wouldn’t know that the axis of the world had already tipped and that everything was sliding towards disaster.

But even on the rue Hallé, there is talk of departure. Marcel talks of it. Mary doesn’t bring up the subject herself, but then neither does she contest it. Head south, Marcel says, which they would do anyway in summer; but go early, be gone before the dam breaks. Because Paris will bear the brunt and break the wave of the advance. So they will head to the south-west, to the coast, to the house in Arcachon. Distance will protect them.

“And you must come and see us there,” Mary says. “It will be a long summer if you don’t come.”

It sounds pleasant and strange, to spend the summer in Arcachon, while the war goes on elsewhere. It is impossible to think of it as real.

—

He just keeps ticking on, ticking over. He tries to work, but with Alfy gone, the translation, previously inchworm, now swallows its own tail. He cannot make it matter even to himself, not any more.

The weather turns bitter; the wind is thin, the temperature plummets. He hunches into himself. He is always cold.

In the street, strangers have an uncanny knack of looking like old friends, like people who have already gone. His sight is far from perfect: the number of times he’s raised a hand in error and, on realizing his mistake, has had to blunder on, resettling his hat, adjusting his glasses, trying to act as though nothing had really been meant by it.

Suzanne’s friends do not disperse. The younger men have joined up; the card-carrying communists have been interned for carrying their cards. But those who are still at liberty do not drift away. They belong, they’re rooted here. And they stand staring dead ahead at what is coming. They meet now with discretion, these friends, at each other’s apartments, arriving in ones and twos, leaving in a similarly staggered fashion. The government’s swiftness to intern is stunning. One does not have to do, one simply has to be.

She takes herself off to these meetings, her collar turned up and scarf wrapped against the chill. He watches her go with a needle-thin interest that he would not quite describe as jealousy. He goes along with her sometimes, when she asks him to. She doesn’t always ask him to, and he wonders if that means there will be someone there she doesn’t want him to meet, or to witness her meeting. There are former lovers drifting round the place; one doesn’t get to their age unmarried without chalking up a few. Her tennis partner in mixed doubles, for example. That fellow.

If there’s a piano in the apartment when he goes, he’ll play it. As the evening wears on, she becomes voluble and insistent and she taps the tabletop with a finger and corrects people, and even in these anxious times there are bright moments when she throws back her head and just laughs. This is her without him, unsolicitous and assertive, and he feels uneasy at it. What is he doing, letting her saddle herself with him?

Cigarette smoke blues the air, a fire glows in a grate, ashtrays fill, glasses empty. He picks out a few tunes, though listlessly, because music is not really required and he has no desire to draw attention to himself. And they talk.

Just a little fellow then, but I remember the last time round; they got within a whisker of the place. The bombing, good God, do you remember? But a whisker is not Paris: they were held at bay; they had to bomb us because they couldn’t get close enough to shoot us in the streets. Yes, but the siege of ’70, yes, it was a while ago, but the restaurants were reduced to serving rat and cat and dog and the menagerie from the Jardin des Plantes, the elephant and the giraffe and everything slaughtered there for food. There’s good eating on an elephant; I wouldn’t say no. That’s not the point: we could be there again before you know it. But things are different now! We have the line, the Maginot. Pfft. The line! Don’t talk to me about the line. The Germans are prepared, that is the thing nobody seems to understand, that while we’ve been sitting on our arses behind the Maginot line playing cards and scratching ourselves, Germany has been farting out smoke and shitting artillery. They’ll be here before you know it and they’ll fuck us properly this time. No no no, that’s alarmist nonsense: the line will hold, the army will stand its ground; the line will hold. The line will hold.

He glances up to his glass, perched on top of the upright piano. There’s just a smudge of purple in the pit of it; he glances back towards the table, and the bottles are empty. They talk in circles and wind themselves up like watch-springs. But what can they do?

She goes to speak, and when the noise doesn’t falter she just raises her voice and continues, till the other voices fall away and she goes on. The key is to do something. Because that’s better than sitting around doing nothing. And so they have to figure out what they can do. Even if it’s only to ensure the fair distribution of elephant steaks.

Someone gets out a notebook and pencil, licks the tip; the mood shifts and becomes purposeful. But not for long, because they know that the moment they show their faces as communists they’ll be locked up, since their loyalties will be assumed to lie elsewhere. But where else now can they lie? They are on their own. Stalin has thrown his lot in with Hitler and will look the other way. There is just the queasy idea of England peering across the Channel and biting her nails, while America stands, arms folded and whistling, pretending not to notice what is going on at all.

People fall silent, and then they start to talk of other things, of their children and their grandchildren and the music and the bitterly cold winter that this is turning out to be. And they must be going. They don’t like to stay late, not nowadays. They make their farewells, pull on gloves and caps and leave in dribs and drabs, heading off into the night, hunched and blowing clouds of breath to disturb the fog.

—

Nora, in her blurry way, is moving around the apartment, carrying a coffee pot. Joyce is playing the piano and singing “The Salley Gardens.” Nora sets the coffee pot down on the hall console, then picks up a vase and moves off again on another of her aimless peregrinations. He watches her as she goes, then he picks up another book, peers at the spine, and sets it in the tea-chest. Joyce finishes the song, lights a cheroot and leaves it to smoulder, then starts to pick away at another tune. “Croppy Boy.” He is feeling sentimental. His voice sounds weak today.

The Joyces are moving out of the apartment and into an hotel. It’s supposed to make things easier, but it isn’t making anything easier yet. Paul Léon has overstepped the mark; it’s easily and inadvertently done. Just an unwelcome word about Giorgio and he has plummeted out of favour as precipitously as if he had fallen down a well. And so his help is no longer wanted here, though help is always wanted here: nothing very much gets done unless someone else does it.

Joyce’s voice trails away; his hands fall still. He closes the piano. He fishes for his stick, rises to his feet. “You’ll take a drink?” he asks.

He sets aside a book, straightens up, brushes himself down. “Mrs. Joyce won’t mind?”

“We shall be discreet. Where’s my coat?” A hand extended, a hesitant step, head cocked like a blackbird, the better to see out of the edge of his remaining vision.

—

At the café, Joyce orders white wine. He drinks as though it’s for the good of his health, sucking away at his glass with a pained expression. He talks, he drinks, he frowns, he drinks, he talks.

“What, anyway, is the use of this benighted war? I cannot see that there is any point to it at all.”

Well, there are Hitler’s incursions—

A dismissive puff. Lines on maps are there to be redrawn. The Brits can hardly get up in arms at that, now can they? They’ve pinkified half the planet.

His persecutions.

But the Jews have always been persecuted. There’s nothing new in that at all. Old as the hills, that is. I don’t see why we should have a war about that now.

Joyce doesn’t want to hear; there is no point in insisting. Instead, in the little local café on the rue des Vignes, under gaslight, the two of them foxed and yellowed by the old mirrors, their two heads bent, his a dark brush, Joyce’s pomaded and streaked with grey, he drinks. He drinks and lets the older man talk; the old accent and the light voice feel like home, and he finds himself thinking of Germany before the war, cool light, heavy pale flesh, solitude, the paintings, the bare spaces on the gallery walls. He opens his mouth sometimes and words fall like stones, and he closes his lips and resolves to keep them closed. Because Joyce is eloquent tonight, for all that he’s exhausted, and whatever he is saying there is always wonder in it, in being in the flow of his talk. Outrage at this state of affairs, the effect that all of it is having on Nora’s nerves, and Lucia’s…nerves. And Giorgio may be conscripted if he doesn’t get out of France, and the fact that his book, his book is not news now, not any more, because of this, this, this politics, and how galling it all is.

“You know the Wake better than anybody else. You know it inside out. You’ve been up to your elbows in it, up to your oxters; you were there all along. So you know what it is, and what it should be seen to be.”

He nods. He knows. He knows. Of course he knows.

“What will you do?” Joyce asks him suddenly.

He pauses, caught off guard. “Drive an ambulance, I rather thought.”

“They’ll have you, will they?”

“I’ll have to look into it.”

“Ah well, yes,” Joyce says. “Well, of course, you see, you’re young.”

He nods. He swills the wine that the other man has chosen, and lets the other man talk, and does not speak any of the sentences that clot and collapse and disperse inside his head.

—

They make their way back just a shade before ten. It’s a damp, still night, and it’s difficult in the blue underwater light, and at the corner Joyce hesitates; he feels his way forward with his stick.

“Filthy night.”

“It is indeed. Here.”

He offers his arm. The older man turns his head blindly.

“My arm…,” he offers again.

He guides him down off the pavement; they cross the cobbles together. He curtails his stride.

“Here’s the kerb,” he says.

“And here’s the steeple.”

The two of them push into the lobby of the Joyces’ apartment building. It is brighter there, a small gas mantle glows. They make their farewells, Good night, God bless, all the old reflexes. Joyce taps across to the lift, his good coat draping warm around him, his hat tamped neatly into place, doing a fair approximation of sobriety. Half-cut, the rush of love for him is overpowering. That James Joyce would consider his company acceptable, when he himself can hardly bear it.

Joyce gets into the lift and pulls the cage across. But before he is whisked aloft: “Ah, and I have a little something for you. I forgot.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll have it sent it round.”

“Thank you—”

But then Shem is gone, hauled up through the dark storeys of the building towards the apartment stacked with boxes, with dust rings on the sideboard from where the ornaments are gone. He is left alone, on the bright-tiled lobby floor, in the cold. Nora will be cross. And she’ll consider him responsible for her husband’s absconding and his state on his return. As though he had bought the wine and held the gentleman’s nose and poured it in.

He pulls his jacket collar up and shoves his way out again. The night streams past him, is wet in his face. He leans into it, as if there’s a wind blowing, though the air is perfectly still. He is drunk, of course; he has no papers, his friends are leaving left and right; Paris is deserted; he is no use to anyone at all. He feels, for once, and only briefly, quite content.

—

The Joyces depart Paris finally at Christmas time. In the breathy quiet of the platform, beside a stationary steam train, he shakes hands with the son Giorgio and the father James, accepts also Nora’s forgiving kiss: sometimes he is held to blame for her husband’s delinquency and sometimes he is not, but while Mr. Joyce is on his best behaviour, then he, too, can hope to be approved. He hands her in; she moves stiffly, troubled by her joints. He can still be useful to them, that much is clear: he can lift cases into the carriage; he can offer a hand to the man himself.

“Come and see us,” James Joyce says. “At Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. Come and see us in the spring.”

“Thank you.” It’s at once a pleasure and an anticipated awkwardness.

The older man nods, settles himself, legs crossed, toe tucked under instep, hands folded on the head of his cane. “Well then,” he says. “Until the spring.”

All the warmth and gratitude, all the unease and discomfort. And of course he just says, “Until the spring,” and shakes Shem’s hand, and then Nora’s, then clambers down from the carriage.

Alone on the platform, he kicks his heels and looks off down the train in the direction of their going.

And then there is the engine’s sigh, the greased shift of pistons and the slow haul into movement, and the train is leaving. It is peeling past, and it takes with it all of those entanglements, and that real and honest awkward love.

He walks through the Gare d’Austerlitz and out into the low sun. As he makes his way home through the streets, the sunlight is sharp between buildings, the blue shadow sliced into wedges. The city seems more stark, more sharply angled, the sky more distant. It seems more beautiful, if that were possible. It seems more dangerous, and more prone to harm.

—

A bitter bright cold day. The lift is out of order and the seven flights leave her out of puff. Suzanne lets herself in, closes the door behind her and eases off her shoes. Her nose is cold, her hands are frozen. She’s already fumbling in her shopping bag, drawing out a little crocheted rug.

“Darling…”

He needs his peace, his privacy. But he also needs to be taken care of, since he can’t be trusted to do it himself. He can put this over his knees as he works; it’ll keep him warm while he is writing.

“Are you there?”

She has spent a good deal of time on it. There is, as her mother would say, a lot of love gone into that rug.

“I have a present for you.”

There’s no reply. She stands, silent, listening to the empty apartment. Disappointed, she lays the rug over the arm of the settee, smoothing out the crocheted squares.

He has left his notebook lying on the table. She stands looking at it.

He will be back at any moment. She’ll make some coffee. She’ll give him the rug. They will have some time together, and she will leave him to get on with his work.

She stands looking at the notebook. She doesn’t go to the kitchen. She moves closer to the table and touches the book; she lifts it. Her whole body’s alert for a foot on the stair, the creak of a board, the shift in sound as the main door opens from the street below, any hint of his return.

It has never been forbidden, that she look at his work. But then, it shouldn’t need to be forbidden.

She opens it.

The pages separate on a mess; they’re thick with scribbles, scratchings-out.

Her skin bristles in unease.

She leafs back through to see what came before. The notebook is three-quarters full; the completed pages are densely covered. But every clear French phrase that has been achieved is barricaded all around by crossings-out and scribblings. He has filled pages, he has written his pen dry and refilled it, he has covered sheets and sheets, but very little is let stand. It seems that all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time.

Baffled, she frowns down at the mess of it.

The hours they’d spent in cafés, he and his friend Alfred, before Alfred joined up, going over this. And now the hours alone. And this is all there is to show for it.

She turns another page. On the verso, he has drawn a little picture of Charlot, the tramp with his bowler hat coming down over his eyes, his toothbrush moustache like Adolf the peacemaker’s, his sagging trousers, his splayed feet in broken boots. What does he think he is doing? Why can’t he simply write? Why can’t he just get on with it?

And then there’s a yell — from outside, in the street. She drops the book and turns to the window, peers down at a scuffle. Is that him? He doesn’t have his papers, oh my God, they’ll lock him up.

And then she sees the ball.

Just a kickabout in the street. Her fear contracts. A bad-tempered game, all elbows and shoving. The ball is sent spinning crosswise on to the pavement, where Monsieur Lunel shuffles along under his black fedora, his body foreshortened by the angle, and one of the lads runs over and scoops up the ball and apologizes, and another comes up and up and stands too close to the old man, his skinny chest puffed out — she can’t hear what he says from up here — and spits upon the ground. Then his mate shoves him, and there’s another scuffle, and the ball bounces off the cobbles, and they chase after it, and Monsieur Lunel, after standing frozen for a moment, shuffles on.

This is what they don’t see, the Amerloques and the Irlandais, the writers and the artists and the wives who come here for the cheap living and the cheap wine and the distance from their mothers, all his fly-by-night friends. They skate over the shining surface; they don’t see the murk beneath.

She peels her forehead from the window, rubs the mark with a sleeve and turns away. She sees the notebook lying there on the tabletop. How exactly had he left it?

She meets him at the door and gives him quick kisses, one cheek and then the other. He has brought a parcel home with him; he drops it on the settee. She hands him a cup, laughs at herself — a tussle in the street, I thought they were arresting you! She shows him the rug that she made for him, though it has already lost half its loveliness: she had thought that they were both, in their own ways, working on the same thing. On his success.

“What’s in the parcel?” she asks.

He touches the rug, pressing a little moss-coloured square of wool with his fingertips. “This is very nice. Thank you.”

He takes the parcel over to the table and lays it down to open it. “It was left with the concierge.” She sees him notice the notebook. “Have you been here long?” he asks.

“No,” she says, a shade too quickly. “Not long. What’s in the parcel?” she asks again.

“Soon find out.”

He opens a drawer and slides the notebook in. Then he turns the package over so that he can get at the knots. The bundle is soft and bulky and he has already noted Nora’s girlish handwriting, but he can’t make sense of it at all. He undoes the knot, tugs the string away and unfurls the waxy paper. Inside there is a bolt of dark twill. He still can’t make sense of it. And then he sees. He lifts it out. It is a coat.

“A coat,” she says.

It brings with it a cloud of scent: pomade, cheroot smoke and lemon soap. A cloud of associations, of time dispensed in cafés and books and drink, the gut-punch of guilt about Lucia. A note tumbles from the folds and lands on the floor. He stoops for it and peers, holding it close up to his face to read. This from the man himself.

“Who’s it from?”

“Mr. Joyce.”

For all of everything, this is what he’s worth. He gets to wear the great man’s cast-off coat.

“Oh,” she says. “Well. That’s handy.”

He folds the coat and lays it in the paper, and fumbles it all back together again. He sits down. He takes out pen and paper.

“What are you doing?”

“A thank-you note.”

“Ah.”

His hand flicks across, leaving loops and curls of blue behind it, then whisking down to traverse the page again. The white swiftly fills with clean blue. Her lips bunch and twist. She turns and moves away to the little kitchenette, where she rummages irritably in the cupboards, drags out tins and packets, shoves them back. She feels as though she has been taken for a fool.

CHAPTER FOUR L’EXODE, June 1940

Anxiety makes the air thick; the urgency is a dream urgency, where there is a desperate need to run and yet the limbs are heavy and entangled. The earth shudders when the bombs hit. The sky is greasy with smoke.

The ticket officer doesn’t look up. “Where do you want to go?”

They’ve been queuing for hours; they’re footsore and twitchy to be gone. He has two bags and she has her backpack. Trains have arrived with their plumes of steam and they’ve left with their plumes of steam, and the concourse remains congested still, suitcases drawn into little settlements with joggled babies and fractious kids and tired old women, and the queue weaves round and through it all, a ragged line of anxious faces and sweated-through summer clothes; it has been skin-crawlingly slow progress to get even as far as the ticket desk. It has been an age. And not once in all that age did it occur to him that this might come up. The only thought so far has been Away.

“There’s a choice?”

The ticket officer looks up now. “Well, no. But people tend to say, and then I tell them what I can give them.” The fellow glances past them at the never-ending queue. “It’s usually over quite briskly.”

Suzanne huffs in irritation. He touches her arm. “So, what can you give us?”

“There’s a train for Vichy in a couple of hours.”

“Vichy…” He turns to Suzanne. She nods, whisks a hand to hurry things along. The old spa town will do; anywhere will do; anywhere away from here.

“It’s a four-hour journey, under normal circumstances,” the ticket officer says. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”

A thought leaps up: Joyce is now at Vichy. They’d shifted there from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy; there was a postcard from an hotel, the Hotel…Beaujolais. Maybe they could get a room there themselves. So they’ll go to Vichy and they’ll see Joyce, and it’s a feeling something like home. A little landslip of images: white wine and talk, and together they’re leaning over a copy of the Wake, and he is reading out the commas and the full stops while Shem frowns and nods and determines what corrections must be made. He can swallow down his chagrin about the coat; he can swallow it down like a gannet. The war will blunder past their windows and bowl along the high street and they’ll barely notice that it’s happening at all.

“Vichy it is, then.”

While the tickets are torn, he counts out his francs. Their little store of money is dwindling at an alarming rate. He tries to gulp the worry down along with the shame, but it twists and flicks and shivers inside, very much alive.

“What will we do in Vichy?” Suzanne asks. They weave through the crowds, lugging their bags, in the hope of finding a quiet corner to settle down and wait.

“Work out what to do next,” he says.

—

The train doors are slammed open; there’s a surge forward through the ticket barrier and down on to the platform. The two of them are pushed along with it. He wants to stand back, to let people in ahead, to wait for the crowds to clear. Good manners are worn deep into the grain. And yet a more atavistic edge shoulders forward too—me, I, need—and he is pushing ahead, his heart beating faster, his body seething with adrenaline. Guards yell and bellow and are ignored. Children cry. Suzanne falls behind, dragged away by her backpack in the crush as though she is being pulled out to sea. And there is also we, also us.

“Come on—”

He reaches for her and she grabs his hand and hers is small and sweaty, and he pulls her up to join him, and they are at the dirty flank of the train, just a yard from an open door. He shoves forward, hindered and frustrated by the bodies ahead of him, the crush that moves into any space behind, the grimed hat and greased hair of the man in front, the solid flesh and the smell of it all. He glances back at Suzanne; strangers’ shoulders press between him and her. She is struggling on, scowling at the nuisance of it all.

“Are you all right?”

She nods, grim. Their hands are clamped tight together between the flanks of others, their fingers intermeshed. His hand stretching back to hers, he steps on to the first tread up into the carriage and drags her with him, insistent.

“Excuse me,” she says, pushing through.

Face tight against the knapsack of the man in front, he gets up the second step and she heaves herself out of the crush to climb up behind him. They are on board.

They are lucky. The concourse is still full. The station doors are bolted. The grilles are locked down; the ticket clerks are gone and the offices are shut. And behind the closed gates and grilles and doors, there are people still waiting, still hoping: once the crowd inside has cleared, perhaps the station doors will be unlocked again, perhaps the Gare de Lyon will reopen and they too can make their way out of the threatened city and go wherever it is still possible to go.

—

The train is an adder, barely warmed by the early sun; it moves by inches, eighths, sixteenths. It hardly moves at all.

A layer of smoke hangs over the city; it rises in plumes here and there, sickly-looking and unsettling.

“Do you think that’s an air defence, to screen the people as they leave?”

“Maybe. Or they’re bonfires.”

“Why would they have bonfires?”

“To be rid of stuff they wouldn’t want the enemy to get their hands on.”

They sit shoulder-to-shoulder on the hard wooden bench. There are passengers packed, standing, down the length of the corridor. He chews his nails when he isn’t smoking; when he isn’t smoking he chews his nails. She stares out of the window, her hands in her lap, knees sloped together; his long legs are tucked uncomfortably in. His two bags are wedged behind his heels; her overstuffed backpack is on her lap.

The train creeps past streets; it begins to pick up a little speed. Passengers strike up conversations. Children chatter, swing their feet. A road swerves towards the line and for a moment the two run side by side. The road is a rubbish dump, a mound of junk and clutter. But then it separates itself into movement, individuals, men and women trudging burdened like ants; into cars, donkeys, handcarts, prams, horses, suitcases, bicycles, frying pans and mattresses, birds in cages, briefcases. A child lugging a baby. An old woman in a pram, legs dangling, pushed by an old man who squints in the bright June sun. His eyes catch on the woman’s white, sharp face above the bundled body. The train pulls past the two, the old woman and the old man scraping along together, and then a fence ticks past, breaking up the image like an old zoetrope, and he closes his eyes, and reaches in behind his spectacles to press on them.

When he looks again, a brick wall ghosts alongside and Suzanne’s head is resting against the window; her eyes are closed and she is breathing softly and asleep. He is glad that she’s asleep. He feels as though he could never sleep again.

When Suzanne wakes, they are out in the countryside and the train has picked up speed. He sits glaring out of the window, across the copses, the wide planes of farmland, at the dotted villages and church spires.

“What is it?” she asks.

“The people.”

“What people?”

He nods across the open land, towards the main road south. The way is packed still, cars nudging along, edging past the pedestrians and pony carts.

“Name of God,” she says. “That must be the whole of Paris.”

He says, “Yes. And…”

“What?” She glances round at him.

“And, I think, the army,” he says.

“What?”

“I think I saw uniforms. Before.” He raises his shoulders. His sight is not that good. “I can’t be sure.”

Her face goes still. She turns back to the window. The train skims across a bridge over the road. And then she sees them too. It’s just a moment, and then the train is past and they’re gone. But a pocket of infantry was slumped on the verge, filthy and unkempt, legs stretched out in front of them in the long summer grass.

“But no,” she says. “What are they doing?”

“You see them?”

She nods.

“It must be a rout.”

She sits back, swallows. After a moment: “Maybe there won’t be so much fighting in Paris. If they are running away.”

“That’s one way of thinking about it.”

“Hmm.”

“But the other way is, with the army there, that makes everyone a target.”

“You think they’ll come?”

She turns her gaze up; she searches the sky. The sky remains, for the time being, innocent and clear blue.

—

The train stops unpredictably, and in awkward places. Time ticks by, and people murmur, and children cry.

They are marooned. An hour; an hour and a half. Her stomach rumbles, and she folds her arms over it. The sun glares on them. Her face is pale and sweaty.

“If we were at a station,” someone says, “we could nip out and buy some bread.”

Further up the train, someone thumps open a carriage door and climbs down on to the track. She watches the dark figure pick his way across to the embankment, then stand there at the edge of the grass. It takes her a moment to realize that he’s pissing, and then she looks away. Soon others are climbing down from the carriages to stretch their legs and relieve themselves; women share a cigarette, or clamber further up through the long grass and off into the bushes. Children hopscotch from sleeper to sleeper; a toddler blinks sleepily in the daylight as his mother holds him, pants around his ankles, and he puddles the gravel.

And then there is a whistle and a rush and a general rebuttoning and regathering, and a flurry to get back inside.

The train grinds back into motion, and for a while is clipping along again, stopping sometimes as other trains whistle past, and sometimes stopping for no obvious reason at all.

—

Vichy is cursed; leaves and tendrils and blooms and branches have been bewitched into stone and steel, and forced into service as buildings and street furniture. There is clean cold light here; the streets are glistening and chill.

Together they head down one of the main boulevards. Every step becomes a conscious effort, and he feels as though he is tacking and lurching along like a golem. They’re being watched — discreetly from café terraces, from the security of linked arms, from behind the defensive barrier of a shopping basket or a yapping dog. Children simply stop and stare. Because Vichy is not used to visitors like these: scruffy, exhausted, travel-worn visitors who flood out of third-class carriages with their belongings bulging from their bags and without the means to make themselves comfortable. Wealth, in Vichy, is as normal as the bubbling warm water; here, nobody carries their own luggage.

One bag slides against his thigh as he walks. Murphy, Murphy, Murphy. The other bag drags on his shoulder, stuffed with clothing, shaving gear, tinned food: the body’s barest needs make for a heavy load. If he could just be rid of one of the bags; to shed either his manuscript or his belongings would be such a relief. But he heaves one strap up his shoulder and hooks a thumb under the other, and drags himself along. Suzanne, craned forward by the weight of her backpack, trudges beside him, silent. They carry on, past the tabac on the corner and the pharmacy with its display of Vichy pastilles, the tins piled in a pyramid, and past the milliner’s shop where the hats are ranged like dead birds in a cabinet.

“The Hotel Beaujolais,” he says. “It’s on this street, it can’t be far.”

She nods. Mr. Joyce, it turns out, will be here. She hadn’t known that Vichy would also mean Joyce, would also mean hard drinking and unhappiness. Whatever he might think, Joyce is not what he needs.

—

There is, thank goodness, a room remaining at the Hotel Beaujolais. Suzanne lets her backpack slide from her shoulder and hit the floor.

Dark panelling, cool tiles: a couple of comfortable-looking armchairs. He is desperate for news, but the only paper is a folded copy of Action Française and he’s not going to stoop to that. Though it needn’t mean anything about this place — anybody could have left it there. For the moment at least, they must assume that this is a decent establishment.

And then the receptionist mentions the price of the room.

“Ah.”

The receptionist’s expression — he is a pale fellow with a neat moustache and clear skin — remains neutral, but then the cost is neither here nor there to him.

“You have nothing less…expensive?”

A minor shrug. “No, Monsieur.”

Because at whatever price they’re charging for a broom cupboard nowadays, there’ll be no difficulty in filling it, with Paris emptying itself out like a toppled-over bucket. Vichy can afford not to be cheap. They’ll have to keep on going, find somewhere more suited to their finances; the Joyces’ hotel was always likely to be too grand for them. He glances round at Suzanne, who has left her backpack on the floor where it fell. She is grey with fatigue.

“Problem?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “It’s fine.”

And so, definitively, he prints his name on the page and signs, committing himself to a sum that he really can’t afford.

“Monsieur and Madame Joyce are staying here, I believe?” he asks, and clears his throat.

“There is a gentleman and lady of that name, yes.”

He thanks the receptionist, and hates him. He takes the key and turns to lift Suzanne’s backpack, brushing off her protests, which are hardly meant. There are too many stairs; they just keep on going up and up until they reach a narrow landing, a corridor and a small dark door, where the number matches the number on their key. Inside, he drops their bags and the two of them fall on to the bed. It sinks beneath them, springs creaking. They lie there, parallel, feet trailing to the floor.

“Are you hungry?” she asks, a little later.

“I am, yes.”

“I’ll get those biscuits,” she says. But she doesn’t move. After a while, he sits up, strips the laces from his boots and toes them off, wincing. Then he unties her shoes for her too, and eases them from her feet and rolls down her stockings for her. Her toes are patched with red, her ankles swollen.

“Put your feet up,” he says.

She heaves herself round with a grunt and falls back on the pillow. He winces his way around the bed and lies down properly beside her. The shutters are closed. His eyelids are heavy. He thinks, I will just rest my eyes for a moment, but the next moment it is tomorrow.

—

He is returning from the bank. Where they will not cash a cheque — not his cheque anyway, not on an Irish bank. The hotel won’t take them either. He doesn’t know what he’s going to tell Suzanne. On a whim he ducks into a boulangerie and buys brioche, the smell making his stomach clench tight like a clam. This is money that should be used to pay for the room, but he doesn’t have enough to pay for the room and so it hardly seems to matter if he dispenses what little he has in dribs and drabs. Food. Shelter. Money. Shelter. Food. Money. It is all so simple and yet so unresolvable, and he is frowning over it, as though there were some obvious solution that he had missed, when his gaze snags on a dark figure across the street. He pushes his specs up, peers, and his face softens. There he is. The man himself. The crowds part around his strangeness as he fumbles along with his stick and glasses, oblivious and uncanny and sharp as you like.

He lopes across the avenue to him, up on to the far pavement, addresses him in English. “Mr. Joyce, sir.” He reaches out a hand, stops short of touching the sleeve. “Good morning to you.”

The head goes up, searching. The eyes are concealed by his dark glasses. He tilts his head.

“My word,” Joyce says. “Is it yourself?”

He says, “It seems so.”

“Ha! At last, thanks be to God, somebody to talk to.”

“Have you had any news, sir, from Paris?”

“No, no. Not a word. No one tells me anything.”

Joyce gropes forward with his stick; he turns his head to catch what he can in what’s left of his sight.

“Is that a dog?”—and an old hand fumbles into a pocket.

It’s a fluffy, perky little thing going by on a lead, tail up, arsehole on show, totally oblivious to the pair of them.

“Yes.”

Joyce has brought out a handful of stones, is picking through them with dry fingertips. “Where is it?”

“Gone,” he says, perturbed.

The old hand closes, slides back into the pocket. “Filthy creatures. They have no souls, you know.”

“Is that so?”

“They run loose all over the village. That place where we were staying. Saint Machin Truc. They bark at me.”

“Do they?”

He watches Joyce quite openly, knowing that he is not himself observed. It has been, what, six months since he saw him last? But it looks as though as many years have passed for the older man. Shem has stepped over a threshold, is suddenly old. He is crumpled-looking, his hair slick with pomade, but the white now shines through. His skin is slumped; he looks as though he’s wearing a mask of himself, of his own skin. The rings roll loose around his fingers.

“How are you, though?” he asks.

A shake of the head, a sigh, and then there falls a cascade of words. “I don’t know what we are coming to, I really don’t. All the books I want are still at the apartment in Paris, and I can’t get hold of anything I want down here. People say that they’ll send me books, but no one ever really sends me books, or not the right ones. Madame Jolas is pestering us to come back to the village, where we are safe, but you know what country life is. Anything is preferable to that, there’s no one to talk to, and the flat’s so small you couldn’t kill a cat in it—” A pause, a moment. “Vichy is a hole, but it is not as deep a hole as Saint-Gérand-le-Puy. I’m very glad, you know, that you have come. You will be an asset.”

To be noticed like this has its brief effect; it makes him more real, it makes him mean something. But the talk goes on and on as Joyce continues with his litany of complaint, and it need not really be him at all that hears it: the lack of notice of his Wake, the pointlessness of this war, the failure of others to see what is really necessary and important, Nora’s impatience, Lucia’s distractedness, Giorgio’s absences — the Lord knows what he is up to. Family concerns, family, family, family.

He nods. Of course. Family is what matters most at times like these.

But family is his mother sitting alone in the house by the harbour, watching the sea wind tear across the water and the cemetery and her husband’s grave. Family is Frank squinting out across the golf course, or hunched over his desk, doing capable things with account books and a slide rule. Is Mollie and Sheila, the tousled girls; is dispersed through Ireland, Wales and England and the Lord knows where. And he can’t go back to that, to family, because there is nowhere to go.

“Did you ever drive that ambulance?” Joyce asks.

“We were somewhat overtaken by events.”

At the hotel, they part with a handshake and a promise to meet later; they will go out for a drink.

And then, the thin old mouth parting on false teeth: “It’ll be just like old times, eh?”

He leaves Joyce waiting for Nora in the lobby and climbs the heavy stairs. Joyce exerts such a deliberate gravity; he draws one in, he buffers one away. One’s kept in orbit, circling.

—

He is woken by a rapping on the door. Suzanne sits up. Her face is lined by the pillow. He stumbles off the bed. In the doorway there’s a red-faced boy in livery, confusing just by being there, and then by being apologetic and in too much of a hurry to make sense.

“What? Sorry? Say that again.”

The boy redelivers his lines. He’s an unconvincing actor, distracted by what’s going on offstage. This is only one of many times today that he will have to blunder through this speech.

“What?” Suzanne says, shaking her head to clear it. “What is he saying?”

“The manager apologizes, we understand that this must be very inconvenient, but we are unable to continue to provide accommodation for you here.”

“What?”

“You must vacate the hotel in the morning.”

“But we’ve only just arrived.”

The boy looks off down the corridor. “It can’t be helped. It’s out of our hands. Government orders.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Paris has fallen,” the boy says, a little too loudly and quickly. Then he pauses, straightens his shoulders, clears his throat. “Paris has fallen, and so the government is to move here. They are to take over the hotel. All the hotels.” Though the boy holds himself straight, his young eyes are brimming.

“If you would settle your bill in the morning, sir, and then vacate the premises.”

He doesn’t move.

The boy gives a little bow, and then turns abruptly and marches a few steps down the corridor, to the next room along.

He closes the door. He can hear the boy, the conversation he’s now having with the other guests, which follows much the same pattern as their own. The rumble of the man’s voice, the higher pitch of the boy’s. His lines sound surer now; by the end of the day he might even have convinced himself.

Suzanne says, “What shall we do?”

He says nothing. He still faces the door, his head bent. His hands in his pocket, he runs the coins through his fingers and his mouth twists.

“But what shall we do?” Suzanne asks. “Where shall we go?”

He still stands there, his gaze on the wood panels and brass fittings. If he could just stop. Give up. Have done with it all.

Suzanne lets go a long slow breath. He hears the springs creak as she heaves herself to her feet. “I’d better pack.” But then she doesn’t move any further; after all, there’s hardly any packing to be done.

He turns back to the room. He fishes up his boots and sits to drag them on.

“Where are you going?” she asks.

“Have to sort something out,” he says. “I’ll be back soon.”

—

It’s the act of a child, he knows it is; he’s reaching up to tug a sleeve, to slip a sticky little hand into his father’s hand.

Joyce, gaunt, his dark glasses on, rests his paws on the head of his cane, and turns to stare blankly for a waiter, and seems more in need of help than able to provide it. The Joyces, just like everybody else currently lodged in the hotels of Vichy, must move on. They must go back to the village, to village life, however unwelcome that must be. They do, though, have somewhere to go, and that is something.

“Get the boy’s attention, would you?”

When the waiter comes over, Joyce orders a pichet of the local white, and taps his fingers till it arrives. When it does he takes a mouthful, winces, then takes another sip.

“The old stomach trouble,” he says.

“You have had another attack?”

He tilts his head. “More a war of attrition. I find that white wine helps. That and Pernod; both are good.”

“Ah.”

“It’s my nerves,” he says. “It’s just a nervous disorder. I’ve had several doctors agree on that.”

He murmurs sympathy, but can only think how much he doesn’t want to ask what he has to ask.

“Well, it seems that we’re to be off,” Joyce says. “And in short order. So that’s that. No wonder my nerves are playing merry hell, faced with a return to that backwater.”

To the village where the dogs are not on leashes and they bark at the strange old blind man fumbling his way down the street, muttering to himself because there is nobody to talk to and throwing stones.

He wants to offer rather than ask. He wants to say, I’ll help you. I’ll come with you to Saint-Thingummy-Bob and spend the days correcting the whole of the Wake again for you. I’ll read out every comma, dash and full stop and you can sit and consider each and every one of them for days, and drink white wine, and think, and change your mind, and change it back again, and there will be time enough and more for all of it; that would be a life well spent, filling your glass, playing the piano or listening to you play and sing; throwing stones at dogs on your behalf.

“Then I suppose we shall try for Switzerland,” Joyce says.

“Ah, yes.”

Then the words come falling out of the old thin lips: “I think that’s the only choice that we have left now, because Switzerland was kind to us before, in the last war. Lucia could come to us there, the best treatment she could hope for is in Switzerland. And Giorgio would be out of the way of conscription. And whatever he is up to in Paris.”

“Good,” he says.

The old man drinks. His Adam’s apple rolls down and up, rearranging the soft folds of his throat.

“I hope you won’t mind me asking…,” he tries now.

The black glasses are shiny; they kick off light. He is being considered, head tilted. Peered at in peripheral vision.

“We are…,” he says, and clears his throat. The words are burrs, difficult to shift. “We find ourselves in some difficulty. It transpires my cheques are not acceptable here, and we are running very low on cash.”

“I don’t have any money,” Joyce says.

He swallows. “No, of course.”

“I have my family to think of, you know. Expenses.”

“I understand.”

He just wants this to be over. The embarrassment is acute. He’ll feel it for ever.

“Getting all of us to Switzerland will leave me overstretched.”

“Oh yes, indeed. Well, we shall manage…” Though he has no idea how. He scoops up his cigarettes, straightens his jacket, his face hot. What will he say to Suzanne?

Joyce turns his head, birdlike. “You’ll wear it out,” he says.

“What?”

“Love.”

“Love?”

“What’s left at the end, it’s threadbare, you can see right through it.”

The older man lifts his glass again, and his throat spasms as he drinks. He, though, leans away from the table and the glasses. He watches, suddenly clear, wondering how it happened. That the old man should be so diminished. That his gaze should have become so narrow. His skin comes out in gooseflesh as old Shem talks on, about the seat of love and where it lies, rather lower than the heart, and the failure of it always in the end, how it leaves him in disgust even to hear talk of it.

Shem is not what he was; he is not what he achieved. How could he be?

“Well,” he says eventually, “I had better go.”

“Eh?” Joyce raises his head. “Yes. I suppose so. So many departures, after all.”

He reaches into his pocket for coins that he can’t afford to part with. He feels light and empty and one step away from himself, almost elated. This sense of loss, the openness that is offered by it. He has not even been abandoned; he was never held that dear. The world is different and brilliant and empty.

Joyce drains his drink, and then sets his glass down and nods quietly, agreeing with his own thoughts.

He counts out his weightless coins.

“D’you know Larbaud?” Joyce says, out of nowhere.

He blinks. “Valéry Larbaud, the writer?”

“Yes, yes.”

“I know the work,” he says, nonplussed.

“Get the boy’s attention, would you? We must have another pichet.”

“Oh, I’m not, no.”

“Nonsense, I insist.”

So he turns in his seat, catches an eye and gestures for more wine, while Joyce talks on.

“Larbaud’s an old friend of mine; he lives round here. You should go and see him. He might be able to help you out.”

“Do you think?”

A nod. “Larbaud is on the side of the angels. And he’s rich. Which is only sensible, if you must be a writer.”

A hand-me-down coat, a favour done by proxy. He drains his glass, and humiliation rinses through him, and it is cleansing.

“Yes, good,” Joyce says. “I’m glad I could be of help.”

—

Madame Larbaud greets him at the door; she is courteous, with a quietness about her that doesn’t invite conversation. This is welcome.

The house is dim and cool and lovely. She leads him through the lobby and the scent of lilacs and the sound of trickling water — in Vichy there is always water — and it is as much as he can do to put one foot in front of the other.

He carries a letter of introduction in his breast pocket, addressed in Joyce’s own hand. It lies there like a plaque over his heart. He doesn’t know what the letter says and he doesn’t want to know. The experience is mortifying enough already.

Her heels click along the floor; his leathered tread is softer on the tiles.

“You know, I imagine,” Madame Larbaud says, “about Monsieur Larbaud’s state of health?”

“I understand that he has not been well.”

“You know that he cannot speak?”

He did not. “I’m sorry.”

She pauses at the door, a hand on the glossy wooden panel, as though she is going to say something more, but then thinks better of it. She pushes the door open.

The wheelchair is placed in a shaft of light from the French windows; Larbaud is reading, the book flat on his lap, his left hand holding it open. Madame crosses the room to her husband. She touches his hand, lifts the book from his lap and moves round to stand behind him. Larbaud lifts his left hand to the newcomer to be shaken.

The hand is cold and soft in his; Larbaud’s eyes are heavy-lidded, his face half-fallen.

“It is kind of you to see me, Monsieur Larbaud.” His hand feels strange with the softness he had gripped. He fumbles in his jacket and produces the letter. His face burns. “This is from our mutual friend, Mr. James Joyce.”

Larbaud does not smile, is perhaps unable to smile, but his face somehow lightens. The letter is suspended there between them, hanging from his fingertips. The seated man doesn’t move to take it — he can’t, of course. Awkward, he moves closer, but then instead Madame darts forward, relieves him of the letter, opens it, retrieves spectacles from a pocket, helps her husband on with them. Her silence is a kindness; it softens her husband’s, makes it less stark. She hands Larbaud the unfolded sheet; he holds it left-handed; he peers through thick lenses, while she looks off and away, leaving him to read privately.

Larbaud’s expression as he reads is itself unreadable behind those shining lenses. He turns away too, towards the high windows, and endures the silence and the shame. The husband passes the letter up again to his wife’s smooth hands. There’s a look, a touch between them. She glances over the letter. She murmurs a few words to Larbaud and he nods. Then she refolds the paper and slips it back into its envelope as she moves over to his desk.

“We should like to help you.”

He swallows. “Thank you.”

“How much do you need? Not just to resolve your current troubles, but to see you on to wherever you are going?”

He shakes his head, not in negation, but because he has no answer for her. It’s a calculation that he cannot make, and a gratitude that is beyond articulation.

—

The money is a thick pad in his breast pocket. His throat is thick too, as he goes with her down the hallway. Their footsteps syncopate.

She opens the door for him. She smiles.

“Thank you,” he says again. The words are entirely insufficient, but they are all he has.

“It’s a little thing,” she says.

It is not a little thing at all. “I shall return the money to you as soon as possible.”

“Well, don’t make things difficult for yourself.” And then she says, “Good luck to you, Monsieur, and good courage.”

She closes the door on him; he catches a glimpse of her face as it turns away, back to that closed room, and the silent man in the wheelchair, and the wordlessness.

Don’t make things difficult for yourself.

He stands there in the blue evening. He lets a breath go. They are saved. For the time being.

He lights up a cigarette and sets off back through the cool residential streets. A proper meal, he realizes, is now possible. He peers in through café windows as he passes, at the neatly laid tables, at the soft old ladies already poking at their salads there. He and Suzanne will find a nice little place; they’ll have dinner tonight. They’ll sleep in a decent bed, and then tomorrow set out again, into whatever follows. They’ll head for — well, for the coast, for Arcachon, if that is possible, if Suzanne is willing to give it a try. They have, after all, an invitation there. And underneath everything is a taint of unease. He is ashamed, he does not deserve; why him, why should he be saved?

On the wider roads and avenues there are carts and cabs lining up along the pavements. The lobby of the Beaujolais is filled with piled bags and trunks, with anxious, tired women settling their bills, with drooping children, and old men monopolizing the chairs.

—

And you must come and see us there, at Arcachon. It will be a long summer if you do not come.

But the station at Vichy is closed to passengers; it is rammed with government traffic and only official travellers are allowed through. If they are heading west, to the coast, they should try one of the stations further down the line. Gannat, say; that’s probably their best bet.

“Is there a bus to Gannat?”

A blowing-out of the lips, a shake of the head: who’s to say?

And so they walk. Bags on back, on shoulder and on hip. Through the town, and then the suburbs, and then out of Vichy itself, the mountains rising fat and green ahead of them, the streams bumbling under ancient stone arches below.

“How far now?”

“A little less far than when you asked before.”

The day is soft and cool and there is a springtime feel to it, and there are people strung out in little clots all along the road, as though they were setting out on a pilgrimage. Little traffic passes: the odd truck, the occasional Citroën, a farm cart. It’s not too bad for now: he and Suzanne are rested, fed, and that’s something. But they are right in the middle of France; this is the core, the omphalos. They must cross half of France again to reach the sea.

“Not that we’ll be walking all that way,” she says out loud.

“No,” he says. “We’ll get on a train. At Gannat. The man said.”

She nods; she watches the mountains for a moment, the birds circling in the updraught. Then her eyes are on the curve in the road ahead, and then down at her feet, swinging out, one after the other. Somewhere, a bird is singing. She doesn’t know what kind of bird.

It’s all right for now; maybe it will continue to be all right.

“But then,” she says, “you know what the trains are like.”

—

This train stops altogether at Cahors. And there is nothing to be done but to descend, stiff and gritty with fatigue, and follow the stream of crumpled passengers out into damp air. The station guard points them along to the reception centre — beds lined up in the hall, hot soup. But they can’t go there, not without the proper papers: if someone asks and he can’t produce them, he could be arrested. So they nod and say thank-you, and she takes his arm, and they peel away, off into the dark.

The rain keeps the streets quiet, makes them conspicuous. No one stays out in rain like this unless they really can’t help it. He turns his collar up, winces as the water runs down his neck. She tugs at her bag strap. He offers her an arm. She shakes her head. It will just press the wet through to their skin.

The rain knocks the blossoms from the trees and the pavement becomes slick and treacherous with petals. Their feet squelch inside their shoes. At the first hotel, the lobby is warm with gaslight. Unhappily, the receptionist informs them, the last room has just been let: she was just about to turn the sign over. They are directed on to a guest house, where the board is already up in a window. No Vacancies.

“I’m tired,” she says.

“I know.”

“I’d settle for a stable now. A shed.”

But no star, no kings, no virgin birth. He takes his glasses off and rubs the lenses on a sleeve. They’re still too wet to wear, so he pockets them, presses his tired eyes. But that’s when she staggers, sways. He reaches out to steady her.

“All right?”

She nods.

Her face, though, is white and running with water, and her eyes close in a slow blink. She would be safe, if it were not for him; she would at least be safer; she would be holed up in the countryside with her mother. She would be staying with a friend. Even now she could be tucked up in a reception centre. There’s nothing wrong with her papers.

“Come on,” he says. He hauls her upright. “There’ll be something round the next corner…” Even if it is just slick pavements, bolted doors.

They carry on. It’s getting dark; the rain continues. They are in narrower, winding streets, which circle in upon themselves, repeating and changing like a melody, at once familiar and different. A thin wind throws the rain right into their faces; their eyes sting. The church looms above them. The street curves away in both directions, a commercial street with all the commerce done and everything locked up and shuttered for the night. Have they been this way before? Are they walking round in circles? Would it even matter if they were, since there is nowhere to go but on? Then Suzanne pulls away from him and stumbles off across the wet cobblestones.

“What—?” he follows her.

She sinks down on a public bench.

And now they’ve stopped. Somewhere a clock chimes ten. He stands beside her, puts a hand on her shoulder. The wool is cold and wet. She leans against him like a dog, eyes shutting, half asleep although still upright. His eyes could close too, and then the sting would be less, of water, and the salt that water picks up off the skin. But he doesn’t trust himself to close his eyes.

“We can’t stop here,” he says.

She nods, her cheek grazing up and down against the cloth of his coat.

“You have to get up. Suzanne. Listen. We have to move on.”

She turns her face up to him, opens her eyes. Her skin is bone-white; her eyes are black.

“Where’ll we go?” she asks.

He blinks and looks away. He wipes his face.

“I don’t know,” he says, “but we have to.” And music winds through and out of the tumbling rain, and his head is filled with the brilliant hallucination of song.

Vom Abendrot zum Morgenlicht

Ward mancher Kopf zum Greise

Wer glaubt’s? Und meiner ward es nicht

Auf dieser ganzen Reise!

His head feels full and overflowing. It seethes with music and fatigue. Her body leans heavy against his; he feels it through him when she shivers. It is deep and hard, a palsy through her bones.

Terror has wormed its way into his. He wipes his face and the wet is cold with rain and warm with tears. There is another voice now in his head. It cuts through the music, the night and the rain, through everything with its sharp incision:

What possible use do you imagine you would be?

“Come on,” he says to Suzanne.

She slowly shakes her head.

“Come on,” he says, and reaches for her arm.

Suzanne mumbles and softly resists his pull. “I feel quite warm now.”

“No,” he says. “You can’t do that.”

He leans down and wraps his arms around her; he lugs her to her feet. For a moment they sway together. Exhaustion has made them ridiculous: they could be toppled with a push. Soaking, they cling to each other, all legs and arms, like a creature of the moon.

Then they are spotlit. The green fleck in her coat, the cold pink of her throat. He leans away to look at her and she blinks like a baby at him, confused.

Who’s watching them?

He scans round. On the far side of the street, above a shop, a window is illuminated. Then a figure looms up against the pane and draws down the blind. Blackout now. They’re back in darkness. It turns out nobody’s watching them. Nobody’s interested in them at all.

“Come on.”

He shifts his grip round her and half carries her across the street, to an unknown door.

—

They eat, huddled in the upstairs room in front of a low fire. Suzanne’s cheeks are hot, and from time to time a deep shiver runs through her. She is capable of nothing beyond the necessities of courtesy. If her eye is caught, she smiles. It’s the best that she can do. She is not yet herself, but at least she has the chance now to become herself again.

The window is misted; it runs with drips. They have been found two rush-seated chairs and given cushions. There is a liquorice liqueur in chipped coffee cups that they both sip at compulsively. There is perfect bread and perfect ham. These are extraordinary comforts.

They wear stale-smelling, borrowed sweaters. Their coats steam over chair backs, their shoes are stuffed with newspaper, their socks and stockings hang above the fireplace to dry.

The lady of the house, who is the keeper, too, of the shop below, asks about what’s going on in the north. Paris has fallen, she heard that from the radio, but you can’t be certain of what you are told, not the radio, not the newspapers, not any more. They keep telling everybody to stay calm, but why should we be calm? Things must be very bad indeed if people will up and leave their lives behind just like that.

“We don’t know any more than you,” he says. “We left before the Germans got there.”

She widens her eyes, considers this. “I suppose you’d have had to,” she says, “or you couldn’t have left at all.”

There is no space for them in the flat, the family is already packed in like cigars in a box. They will have to sleep downstairs in the shop. They can borrow blankets.

He watches Suzanne down the narrow stairs; he carries the bundle of bedding. She is doing what she’s told without demur, she’s uncertain of her footing. She holds tight to the handrail, like an old woman. He is still worried about her.

The shop below sells religious paraphernalia. It is populated with plaster saints. Christ hangs, his ivory flesh crucified over and over again, all around the walls. Sacred hearts flicker in the light of their little candle. This is the deus ex machina by which they have been saved.

They huddle down behind the counter, backs to the panelling, the counter-top a narrow ceiling above them. The little shop is riddled with draughts. He fumbles a borrowed blanket over her shoulders, draws the other up over his knees. They sit shivering side by side. There’s a steady drip from the blocked guttering and the tumbling rush of water down the street outside. He huffs out the candle and the saints blink out of sight. In the darkness, she huddles closer, her face pressed into the covers. Her voice comes muffled through the blanket.

“It smells of feet.”

“Want me to turn it round?”

She shakes her head.

After a while, she says, “I’m so cold.”

He fumbles his blanket loose and lays it over her knees too. Stiff, she pulls her blanket out in a wing and slides it behind his shoulder, draping it round him.

“Well,” he says. “This is not so bad.”

She tuts.

“You’ll be missing your lovely bench, then, and the rain?”

He can just about make her out in the light from the street: her white face, beautiful and alien as those plaster saints. He should never have burdened her with him; he should never have let her make herself a part of what he did. Her head sinks down to rest on her knees.

“You see, you’ve got these great long legs,” she mumbles. “And mine are only short.”

The warmth gathers between them; their outer edges are still cold. Blinks slow; breath softens. Now and then there is a shiver. In the hallucinatory slip towards sleep, it seems to him that the statues swell and shrink with breath. Blood wells from wounds and drips, drips, drips. And below, on the bare floorboards, human bodies share the almost nothing that they have, and go on living.

CHAPTER FIVE ARCACHON, Summer 1940

The waves creep up and crash on the far side of the rue de la Plage. The breeze is cool from the Atlantic and takes the sting out of the sun. The two men sit on the terrace, under the shade of an awning. Their hands are brown as they reach to lift and shift the veined marble and speckled granite pieces.

It has been — who would deny it? — a beautiful summer, full of ugly news.

Studying the chessboard, a cigarette smouldering between his knuckles, he tries to conjure all the futures he and Marcel Duchamp might summon up between them here. Marcel lifts a piece, and sets it down, and a web of potentiality collapses and falls away to dust: the future refines itself. He follows threads of possibility. He thinks.

Marcel tweaks the brim of his white straw hat low, to shade his eyes. Mary reads on the sunlounger, soft-limbed and tanned, and every so often he hears her sigh and turn a page.

He takes a long drag on his cigarette, and lets the smoke go, and lifts his knight.

When Suzanne joins them, after her swim, all slicked wet hair and lean tan, Mary looks up with a smile and sets her book aside. Drinks are proposed and the game put in abeyance till the following day. The stone figures cast long shadows as the sun sinks, and everything is softened by the Charentais-pink light. They drink and talk and laugh and it is all apparently quite lovely. But it is also a bubble. Everybody knows that it can’t last.

“There is Spain, of course; we could go to Spain.”

“Why would you go to Spain?”

“A friend of mine’s in the British Consulate there. And it’s not far.”

“That’s no reason to go anywhere. You don’t want to go to Spain. Spain will be shit.”

“Marcel!”

“Sorry. My apologies. The ladies’ tender ears, et cetera. But it will be shit. You know it will.”

“You’d need a car to get to Spain.” Mary turns to him, speaks in sudden English.

“Do you think so?”

“Well, it’d be a hell of a walk.”

“Oh, he could walk it,” Suzanne says, and they are back in French. “He could walk the legs off a mule, you should see him walk, my God.” Suzanne lifts her glass; he looks to her, but she doesn’t catch his eye. He has offended her, it seems, but he doesn’t quite know how.

“You don’t want to go to Spain.” This is Marcel again. “Bloody fascists.”

Mary’s tone is emollient, explanatory: “I don’t think he is suggesting they settle there permanently.”

Marcel tilts his head at this now. “America?”

“Ireland,” he concedes.

“Ah, you’re going home.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that.”

Suzanne looks up at him, his heron profile, his shadowed eyes. His spectacles have been tucked carefully away. He turns his head and meets her look with that startling blue gaze.

“What would we do,” Suzanne asks, “in Ireland?”

He shrugs. “We’d get by.”

Suzanne looks at him, then down at her glass. She turns it round and round on the tabletop, watching the light caught there, the way it stays put no matter how much she twists the glass. Her cheeks feel hot.

“Better off in America,” Marcel says. “Ireland won’t last. Not after England falls.”

Mary gives him a look.

“I’m telling you. America will be all that’s left. Anywhere else will just be more of the same, and it will be shit.”

A bruised silence. Suzanne watches as Marcel drains his glass, and pours himself another drink, and starts talking about New York. He, though, has reverted to wordlessness; she can hear him breathing, and that is all; breathing, thinking, unfathomably thinking. While Marcel goes on: New York is the future; New York is where they should all be heading now; New York will soon be all that’s left of Europe.

“I miss Paris,” Mary says lightly.

“You’ll always miss Paris.” Marcel lifts his cigarette case from the tabletop. “From now on, all of us who ever gave a fig for it always will. Paris won’t be Paris any more. Paris can never truly be Paris again.”

He, now, leans away from Marcel; he folds his arms, glances over to the chessboard.

“Well, Paris is my home,” Mary says. “It’s where my books are.”

“You can make more books,” Marcel says, over a huff of cigarette smoke. “You always do.”

There’s a silence after this, and it extends just a little too long before Mary speaks again.

“I’ll go see what’s holding dinner up.”

She gets to her feet and pads off inside the house.

—

Later, the two of them walk home together along the promenade. She slips her bare arm through his; it is cool silk, and heavy.

“Earlier, what you said about us going to Ireland.”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean it?”

“I dare say.”

“You said you couldn’t breathe there, couldn’t sleep, you couldn’t write.”

He nods.

“But you would go. We would go.”

“If we had to. But, you know, you’d hate it there.”

“You think so?”

There is a long pause, in which their feet crunch along the sandy boards and the wind blows her hair into her eyes. She tucks it back behind her ear, looks at him sidelong, waiting for what might come.

“I’m at a loss, to tell the truth,” he says. “There’s nowhere left to be.”

They walk on, arm in arm, through the summer night and the sound of waves breaking on the shore. The world is ending, and it is exuberantly, ridiculously beautiful.

—

The year turns, and the shadows lengthen, and they do not go to Ireland, or even Spain. The Atlantic wind blows chill, and Mary and Marcel’s arguments heat up. America, Marcel says. America America America. New York. Mary just says Paris, and Home.

But Marcel does not leave, and neither does Mary. Nobody leaves. Nobody goes anywhere at all. The bubble holds, shimmering in the end-of-summer cool.

He, though, at least writes letters; he sends off enquiries and tries to find out what could be done. Replies come from Madrid. He hands one such to Suzanne, watches her face as she sits reading it in the dim little salle à manger, where the furniture is too big for the room and must be edged and shuffled round and leaves bruises on the hips and thighs.

She lays the letter down. “Well. Should we?”

“I think so. Probably we should.”

She considers the letter again, the official stamp, the friendly-but-cautious tone. Safe passage through Spain is still possible. Once in Portugal, finding a berth to Ireland would be relatively unproblematic, since commerce continues between the neutral countries more or less uninterrupted.

Daylight gleams on the tabletop. His expression is null, withheld, his back to the light. She cannot make him out at all.

“Well,” she says.

He shrugs. If they go, everything changes. They would have to get married. Mr. and Mrs., the clerk at the Legation had said. It’s the only way Suzanne could travel with him. They’d take ship, dock in Dun Laoghaire in November. His mother would be happy to have him grown up and respectable, would try, for a while, to like Suzanne. Frank would give him a job. He would knuckle down; he would loathe every ticking minute of it. Suzanne’s English would improve; she would use it to complain about everything because it isn’t French. And that would be it, for ever. And he can’t face it.

“If you want to,” he says.

She raises her eyebrows, pulls in her chin, assesses him. “We’re getting by, though, aren’t we?”

“In Cahors, that night,” he says, “I thought that you would die.”

“Well, I didn’t. Neither of us did.”

“If you had, it would have been my fault.”

“Don’t be stupid.” She pushes her chair back, edges out and round the table.

“But what will we do?”

She hands the letter back to him. “Look at you. Like a dog that’s had its bollocks cut. I’m not going to Ireland with you, not like that.”

—

Pétain delivers his quavering speeches to the nation over the radio waves and he is not to be believed. But still, the news from Paris, when it trickles in from other sources, from friends of friends and newcomers in town, is not so terrible after all. The city seems to have fallen softly: it’s occupied, but it hasn’t been destroyed. The government has graciously stepped back and ushered the invaders in, and little material damage has been done to the capital. There have been skirmishes in the streets, but as yet there have been no massacres. Cafés and cinemas and shops are reopening already; the Opéra is lit up again. There is still wine to be drunk and dinner to be eaten and films to be seen, if you have the money and if you can stomach the company. They come and go as they please, the occupiers, cameras dangling round their necks, gawping at the sights, cluttering up the place, buying knick-knacks. If you can live with that, then you can live in Paris; you can live in what has become a resort town of the Reich.

It’s worth a try, isn’t it? It will still be Paris, won’t it? More or less.

CHAPTER SIX PARIS, Winter 1940

The spine of a small fish lies picked quite clean between them. Suzanne is busy with the décorticage of the fish’s head: her slender, quick fingers and little knife pick the flesh from the cheeks, then tease out the eyes and brain. Capable. That’s what he thinks. She is so capable. He is lucky that she is.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

She gathers the bits together, then presses and smears them on to two coins of bread.

He has his papers at last. He has his letter of certification. The return to Paris has enabled this much. His presence in France is now legitimate; he is allowed to stay. The fact of the occupation seems to have finally added a degree of efficiency to the Legation’s work, which the mere threat of invasion never did. He is entitled to the same rations as any French citizen. So he has his fourteen ounces of bread a day. These two pieces are the last of it. They are a reminder of three hours of queuing, with a book in hand, shifting his weight from foot to foot. Trying not to think of cigarettes. Of which there is a dearth.

She hands a disc of bread to him.

“Is there anything we can do?” he asks.

She pulls her bread apart now, having so carefully assembled it. “I don’t know.”

They have twelve ounces of coffee a month. Twelve ounces is not even close to enough, not even for a week. Twelve ounces cannot in any reasonable way be made to stretch to a month. He is in constant want of coffee. The headaches are blinding.

“Do you want to go down to the Commissariat and ask?”

She breaks a fragment of crust in two, and slips one half between her lips.

“We could just ask.” He bites, and carefully chews, and an eyeball pops between his back teeth and he tastes salt. “If they know people know that he is there, and are concerned about him, it might help.”

“You think they would treat him more kindly?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe I will, then.” After a moment: “I see you’ve been reading that dreadful stuff again.”

His copy of Mein Kampf lies face-down, splayed out upon the table. He does not usually treat his books like this.

“I don’t know how you can bear it,” she says.

He swallows carefully, licks his lips. “It’s important.”

“It’s dreadful.”

“Yes, but it is important.”

These words have redrawn the map of Europe, they have leached out the different colours of the world. They have sucked up rights and liberties. These words kill. The world is different because of them.

“But does it help?”

“I don’t know if it helps.”

She teases her bread into crumbs, her lips twisted. To choose a word is to force feeling into shape. To speak that word is to hand that feeling and that shape over, and watch the other person turn it round and find colours and contours of which one had not been aware. And that is what Suzanne is struggling with now. Because these feelings do not have an easy fit with words, they are ugly and clumsy, like phlegm in the throat. Language becomes a fumble, a blunder, sputtering. It fails her.

Because a friend of hers, someone she’s known since she studied with him as a youngster at the Conservatoire, has gone. Just gone. She found the flat empty and the door sealed and the neighbours twitchy and boggle-eyed in their doorways, wanting the conversation over and the door shut and her gone. No, they didn’t have a clue why he was taken; no, there was no sense to be made of it at all; such a sweet man, such a gentle soul, never a moment’s trouble from him and they’ve been neighbours for a decade. No, it was not the Germans; it was the French police.

Her friend was a communist. That’s all that she can imagine that they had on him. They are awkward things to carry round with you these days, principles.

And her friend is not alone in his disappearance.

Old Monsieur Lunel also seems to have dropped out of existence. First the yellow sign went up on his draper’s shop. That itself wouldn’t stop his regular customers from shopping there, but the Boche, the Green Beans, were the only ones with any money, so it hardly mattered if anybody else wanted to do business with him. Then one day the place just didn’t open, and then there were new managers, and the yellow sign came down, and nobody knows where Monsieur Lunel went, who used to make such a pet of Suzanne, who’d throw in thread and tape gratis when his wife’s back was turned. Whose daughters would chat with her, would shake their heads and laugh at the old man’s flirting. Whose grandchildren would learn their spellings behind the shop counter, would use buttons as counters to do their sums. Nobody knows where any of them went.

She still hopes it could be a magic trick of their own devising. A disappearing act.

“That graffiti is disgusting,” she says. “Did you see?” There’s a deep line between her brows.

“At the Lunels’?” he asks.

She raises a shoulder. “They’re scrubbing it off. The new people. Do you think you could put that away while we’re eating?” She flaps a hand towards the German book. “Or, better, chuck it out. Throw the damned thing on the fire. It gives me the shivers.”

He closes it.

“I don’t know how you can stomach it at all.”

He pushes it aside.

“I hate it. It makes me sick.”

She shoves it off the table. It tumbles, lands with a thud on the boards, pages fluttering.

He leans over to pick it up.

“I’m living on my nerves here,” she says. He straightens with the book. “I’m living on my nerves and you’re acting as though everything’s normal, as though it’s nothing, as though there’s nothing to be said.”

He closes the book, gets up and shelves it. “Not at all.”

She glares at him. Then she stands up and stalks to the door and shrugs herself into her coat.

“You’re impossible,” she says.

She claps the door shut behind her, clatters down the stairs.

He picks up the plates and takes them to the little pantry to be washed. He could have said, perhaps, that he is trying; to get a fingernail into this, to get a foothold.

—

It is a brutal winter. The wind cuts to the core and whips snow.

Shortages are sudden and hard and unpredictable: one day there is no milk to be had, another there are no matches; he goes to buy razorblades and it turns into a tour of the quarter’s pharmacies: he finally gets hold of them in a drab little corner shop near Saint-Sulpice. Coffee becomes available again, but it’s a ghost of what it was; it’s no longer made of coffee beans, but roasted barley corns. The butcher’s shop closes at noon, because there’s nothing left; the meaner cuts are now expensive, but they disappear as quickly as the steak, since they’re still off the ration and so can be simply bought. The shelves in the épicerie are empty. Rationing quite quickly becomes abstract: it doesn’t really matter what your share of nothing is.

He lights the gas under the cold coffee pot, lights a cigarette from the gas to save on matches. He heats up the liquid, sloshes it into a cup, drinks it black. It looks like coffee but it tastes like watery burnt toast. He dreads the day when they start to ration cigarettes.

At the table, he holds his ink bottle up to the light, sloshes the fluid from side to side. The glass base is domed and thick. It’s deceptive. He pulls out a pocketful of coins and drops them on the table, sorts them into heaps, tidies the heaps into columns. He writes the word ink on a scrap of paper torn from a cigarette packet. That itself, he thinks, is a waste of ink. There may not be any more ink to be got.

On the corners there are new signposts; there are new signs on the shops. It’s obvious they’re in German even before you read them — the print shrinks to fit all the letters of lengthy compound words. On the front of the neighbourhood cinoche it now says Soldatenkino. So the locals cannot go to see a film there any more.

Bread, though, remains the most pressing issue. They take it in turns to roll out of bed and heave on layers of clothing and go to join the queue. Before the shop opens, the line has grown behind him; it now stretches down the street and round the corner. The press of bodies before and behind, the stink of old clothes. He pulls his collar up, wraps his arms around himself. Stamps his feet in his thin boots. Closes his eyes and does his best to take himself elsewhere.

Consider well the seed that made you. You were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

When he surfaces again, there is Lucie Léon, struggling home in a buttoned-up coat with a muffler wrapped round her mouth and chin. He hails her and she tugs the muffler down and they talk. She and Paul have been back in Paris for some time now, with the family. She’s a journalist, she has her work, and work is work and must go on. He feels an ache of anxiety for her. It is not going to get any easier for them. The family is Jewish.

“How are the children?” he asks.

She shrugs, smiles. “Always hungry. Outgrowing their clothes.”

She, herself, looks translucent in the winter sun.

—

Suzanne has unravelled an old sweater. She is knitting him mitts, the fingerless kind, so that he can continue to write despite the cold — so he can at least hold his pen. It’s complicated work, the separation of the fingerholes, the angling of the thumb. She’s counting stitches, tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth. She will not allow him any excuses: there can be no reasons not to write.

“I saw Lucie Léon today,” he says.

She lets her hands fall, the knitting bundled in her lap. “Lucie! How is she getting on?”

“She seemed all right.”

He gets up, prowls out to the pantry, where he opens cupboards, stares at the bare shelves. A quarter-full bag of barley-coffee, an inch or so of brandy, a small packet of saccharine. A tin of toothpowder.

“I bought a swede,” Suzanne calls. “And there are two carrots left. I’ll make a purée later.”

He nods, in the little pantry, where she cannot see him; he calls back to her, “Thank you.” But it wasn’t his own hunger that he had been considering.

—

The next morning, they wake to an apartment of ice. They fumble into their clothes, clumsy, skin bristling, their breath clouding the air. The heating-pipes are cold to the touch.

“The boiler must have packed up.”

Huddled in her little cubbyhole off the lobby, the concierge just shakes her head, her hands stuffed into her armpits. She has her husband’s old coat pulled on over layers of sweaters, wraps, aprons and cardigans. She has a blanket over her knees.

There’s nothing wrong with the boiler; the boiler’s completely fine, or it would be, if they had anything to feed it with.

This is, she informs them, the drop that made the vase overflow. Simply put, there is no coal. There is none to be had. Not from their usual supplier, nor from any other, and believe her, she has tried. Between them, she and her husband have telephoned to or trudged round every coal yard in the quarter, and there’s nothing in them but horse dung and black dust. The coalmen are in trouble: it should be their busiest time of year, but they have nothing left to sell.

Suzanne’s not having it. “That’s ridiculous.”

The woman shrugs. “That’s the way it is.”

“But why?”

“The coal’s gone the way of the potatoes and the wheat and all the blessed wine.”

“What way’s that?”

“To Germany.”

—

But life is not impossible, not yet. There’s a fireplace in the apartment, though he has never thought to use it before. Suzanne crouches to peer up the chimney, pulls out damp balled newspaper, which is followed by a fall of soot and twigs and the mummified body of a bird. They drop the corpse in the waste chute, then flatten out the paper and read the news from March 1936. There in grey and paler grey is news of the remilitarization of the Rhineland, an obituary for Jean Patou. That one could feel nostalgic for that!

Stiff with cold, they scavenge fallen wood and fir cones in the parks and squares and from the trees that line the avenues. They build inexpert smoky, spitty little fires in the grate and huddle close to them, wrapped in blankets. But the parks are soon picked clean; all the lowest branches are torn clear off the lindens and the plane trees; the boards are dragged down from the windows of boarded-up shops. People — people who are clearly much better equipped for this than they — start to cut down trees, so that there is nothing left but sawdust, and the disc of a stump, and an absence up into the air that the tree had used to fill.

—

She gives up her apartment: impossible to keep both places.

He tries to work. There’s a tickling at the back of his brain, an irritation, something squirming and wanting to be noticed, but there’s too much else going on for him to feed it, to grow it, to tug it out into the light to be examined. The complaints of the body can’t be dealt with, and so become insistent, intrusive, far noisier than the quiet need to write. Hunched at the table, the little crocheted blanket over his shoulders, mitts on his paws, his empty stomach whines and pops; his feet are a torment of chilblains, his nose is ice. He finds himself staring for he doesn’t know how long at the blank page in front of him, or out of the window at the grey sky, his thoughts caught up in his body’s and his friends’ distress. His being here has merely added to the general burden. Another mouth. He is disgusted with his hunger, with his needs.

“Sorry, I didn’t want to disturb you, but…”

He holds the door wide with one hand, grasps his blanket at his throat with the other. Suzanne is carrying a bundle of something; she lugs it into the apartment, dumps it down on the floor.

“I’m going to need your help with this, if you don’t mind.”

She is shifting furniture now.

“It’s too cold to move,” he says.

“It’s too cold to stay still.”

She’s lining up chairs, backs turned to each other, six foot or so apart. As though they’re about to march away across the rug, then stop, and turn, and fire.

“What’s all this?”

“I had an idea.” She jerks her head towards the bundle. “Just lift that for me, would you? Help me shake it out.”

The bundle unfurls into a hefty sheet of canvas; it smells of damp and is spotted here and there with mould. A forgotten dust sheet, or a tarpaulin used in some long-ago déménagement. When they shake it out, dust motes spin into the cold winter sun.

“Where’d you get it?”

“It was in the basement.”

“Isn’t it somebody’s?”

“Yes,” she says. “Ours.”

She gestures for him to move round to the far side of the chairs. Between them they spread the fabric over the ladder-backs, so that it drapes down to the floor on either side. She straightens out the edges, tucks them in under the chair-feet to hold the fabric taut. He crouches down on the other side to do the same.

“Did you ever do this as a child?” she asks.

He’s still not quite certain what they are doing. “Eh?”

“Make a den.” She lifts a fold of canvas, glances inside.

He takes a step back, squints at it. Oh yes. “No.”

“We did. Once in a while. On a rainy day.”

She ducks in underneath the canvas; he follows.

Inside, the air is frowsty; the light glows through the fabric. Beneath them is the old rug, with its faded Turkish patterns. He arranges himself uncomfortably, draws up his knees, feels ridiculous.

“You can work in here.” Suzanne blows on her hands. “It’ll be warmer.”

“Yes,” he says. “I see.”

She is pleased with herself. He smiles for her. It makes sense, of course it does, and it’s also utterly absurd. The two of them are hunched there in a tent on the rug, as though this is a game. As though later there will be nursery tea and bath and pyjamas and prayers and bed, and not just more cold, more hunger.

“Do you want your book?” he asks.

“Please.”

“And coffee?”

“Oh yes, please.”

“It’s horrible coffee.”

“Comme d’hab.”

He scrambles out, unfolding his long limbs. He finds her book; he finds a cup and rinses it. He dawdles over these little tasks, leaving her tucked away out of sight. She keeps doing things for him unasked, her kindnesses weave a mesh of obligation. He stirs in saccharine and watches the ersatz coffee spin and then fall still. No question now of milk. He brings these things back to her, passes them through the opening of the tent and crawls in after them. He folds himself up, knees and elbows. It’s warmer, yes, inside the shelter, in their shared warmth. They are toe-to-toe. The fabric drapes above his shoulders. His neck is bent. He can feel her breathe. The world has closed down to this. To body and breath. Ridiculous.

—

He carries it with him like the stone in his pocket, cold and hard and unassimilated; it jolts against him with each footfall. He’s aware of very little else. James Joyce is dead.

His stride takes him without thinking through the streets and through the fog, as it used to take him along the lanes and tracks and paths up into the mountains back at home, away from his mother and her blue scrutiny and all those domestic entanglements. It’s a January afternoon and it hasn’t been properly light all day. He passes braziers where men shuffle chestnuts, and the damp posters on the flank of a building, and graffiti, and the smell of drains, and the pâtisserie with one solitary galette des rois in the window, and the warm chatter from a café by the Métro Charles Michel—And so I told him he could go to hell, and Excellent idea, I was just thinking that myself and It really is the most extraordinary thing—that he realizes only afterwards was in German. The Boches. The Chleuhs. The Haricots Verts. And German is still and always beautiful.

He finds himself where he should have realized he was going: the rue des Vignes; he stares up at the Joyces’ old apartment. The windowpanes reflect the fog and look opaque. This is the last place of their own in Paris: Shem’s books, he said, were still in there; maybe they still are. He recalls rubbed wallpaper, fingerprinted light-switches, the greasy brown telephone set: all of them polished by Joyce’s hands, grazed by Joyce’s shoulders, haunted by his breath. The people living here will have no idea that they’re buffering up against this extraordinary ghost.

Because James Joyce has died in Switzerland. But it’s Paris that he’ll haunt.

Police, gendarmes, coming round the corner from the rue Bruneau. It doesn’t do to be seen loitering. He steps down on to the road. He feels the weight of an arm on his, catches the click of a walking stick, a voice whispering in his ear. The inconvenience; what a panic over the latest bobard, he doesn’t believe a word of it, not a word. Can the world not get by without another war? His Wake may as well have been published in secret for all the notice it’s received.

All that brilliance tied to a failing body, to be dragged round like a tin can on a string.

He walks on.

In the cold, in the fog, his feet measuring out distances, he tugs at his cuffs, turns his head against his collar. Still, faintly, there is the scent of the old man’s pomade and cheroots and lemon soap. There’s a song in his head, “The Salley Gardens,” sung in that astonishing quavering voice, and the taste of whiskey at the back of his tongue, and, and, and — that thrill in the blood at finding himself favoured, at being accepted into that charmed circle. Of being useful to a man like that. And then the sick lurch of the hand-me-down coat, and the favour by proxy.

He rubs his hands over his head; the hair stands up in fuzz.

He walks on.

But Paris isn’t Paris any more. He walks past the closed shops and the stripped trees, and a confiserie with a display of pasteboard confections, an étalage factice, and the quiet, skinny kids on their way back home from school, and the off-duty German soldiers strolling past in their good coats, and the lean women with their shawls and baskets and their pinched looks, and the potholes in the road and the red banners hung like washing from the balconies, and the nervy scavenging dogs and the flights of shabby pigeons and the sandbags stacked on the pavement, where policemen stand and watch him pass. Let them ask for his papers. He has papers. He doesn’t care who sees them.

He walks on.

It is a cold world, and Joyce has turned away from it and finally woken from the nightmare.

And with Shem gone, everything is different. After Joyce, what is the point of writing? What else is there to say?

—

He keeps a tally in his head; he keeps an eye out. Neighbours, acquaintances, familiar faces: he ticks them off when he spots them in the street, in the boulangerie queue or in a café. There are so many people, too many people to keep track of — the shop girls and the young curé and the old fellows who play boules on the square, and the new mother with the child strapped into a second-hand baby carriage, who has that anxious jostling air because the baby’s needs are so much more urgent than her own. And the two ladies at the pressing whom he passes, and the office-bound functionary. This, for the moment, is something he can do. He can notice. He can keep a kind of reckoning. That, and one cigarette, even now that cigarettes are rationed, for that shabby-smart old fellow, the sale métèque who’d asked him the time on the Place Falugière. He’s saving it for when he sees him again.

It’s easier with friends, with people he actually knows. He can ring them up. He can call round to their apartments; he can drop by their haunts. No, no, he can’t stay, no, he won’t take anything. He happened to be passing and thought he’d look in and say hello: so, hello. No, really, he can’t stay. No, really. Well, maybe just a small one.

Alfy has been demobbed. He is back teaching at the Lycée. Still the sturdy cheerful presence that he always was, but his cheeks hollow now and his eyes haunted, after the defeat. Always ready for a drink, a chat, sometimes a game of tennis; but also always glancing discreetly at his watch. Yes, they must get together and make some headway with that translation; how has he been getting on with it alone? Himself, oh, busy, busy. So busy, really; it breaks his feet; never a moment’s peace. Will have to dash, because. Has to go and meet someone. Right out of the way; pretty much the opposite direction to where you’re going. Wherever you are going. So he’ll make his farewells now.

Alfy’s not necessarily lying, but there’s a lot of flannel here, a lot of bluff. Something is not being said. And since Alfy clearly prefers not to confide, he doesn’t really feel that he can say anything more than a platitudinous Take care. They part at the corner; he watches till Alfy reaches the next crossroads, and turns away. No backward glance.

Well, that was Alfy, and he was, for that one moment, there. He marks his friend off, on the tally in his head.

Tick.

—

He walks on, all the way to Mary Reynolds’s house on the rue Hallé. It is calm and dim and cool after the bright street, and she draws him inside as though these are the first steps of a dance. He follows her into the shadows, with her pale nape and the cornsilk of her cropped hair. She pours him a fine, offers him a seat. She puts on a ’78 and he melts into the chair.

For a while they just listen, sip. But he must know how she is faring, so “How are you getting on?” he asks.

She laughs, shakes her head. She had thought that she’d get so much work done here, back in Paris, that’d she’d just hole up at home and make her books. That there’d be nothing else to do. But the reality is that she is getting nothing done; she can’t bring herself to do it. She can’t make it feel important any more: it has no context, it makes no sense, it just doesn’t matter.

“Does it have to matter?”

“I’m used to it mattering.” She shrugs. “And then everything is such a fag, these days! Just the bare essentials take up so much of one’s time and energy. Living is a vocation now; life’s an art. One must carve it out for oneself every day.”

She moves to lift her glass; her long earrings catch the light. At least she is good at it, at this carving out of life. She does it with conviction.

“Any news of Marcel?”

Her face puckers up, half smiling, half a frown. “He’s quit,” she says.

“Quit?”

“Quit work.”

“No.”

She nods in contradiction. “It’s not that he can’t work — it is simply that he has decided not to.”

“And that’s that?”

“That’s that. All he’ll do now is chess.” She has heard it far too often, has got it by rote, is bored of it. “Art has become shop-soiled. You can buy and sell a picture or a sculpture, but you can’t own a game of chess.”

The purity of that. That’s something.

“Yes, he’s right, of course, I know,” she says. “But where does it take you, in the end?”

Through a complex web of potential, towards an endgame that is at once foreseeable and shifting, into silence, stillness. “It’s rather beautiful.”

“It’s a shame, is what it is. He was in Marseilles for a while, and Sanary-sur-Mer. He’s still planning to go to New York.” She lifts a shoulder. “I’m staying here.”

She parts her lips to say something more, but then the needle shifts into the hiss and fuzz at the centre of the disc, and she goes over to lift the arm and slide the record away. She has no notion of what an indulgence it has been to him, the music. More so even than the glass of brandy.

She speaks over her shoulder: “Would you abandon your home because you had house guests who wouldn’t take a hint? I’m not leaving. They can go.”

“You’re right, of course. It’s dreadfully bad manners.”

A delicious smile. “Shocking.”

—

When he leaves, she kisses him on both cheeks. He catches the scent of her powder, feels the coolness of her hair. He should be glad that she continues just the same, when so much else is changed; but he can’t quite work out why he’s so unnerved by her. Her words have stuck with him like ink on the skin, smudging in and creeping along tiny creases.

“You take care of yourself, now,” she says.

“And you,” he says. “God bless.”

Stepping back into the street is like coming out of a matinée. Dazzled, heady with brandy, he ambles along, chewing on their conversation, her gestures, that cheeky defiance, all the way home.

But where does it take you, in the end?

I’m not leaving. They can go.

Later, he lies awake, his back turned to Suzanne’s soft breathing, his toes twisted in the sheet, his shoulder denting the ticking and his ear pressed into the pillow. He can’t sleep: he is haunted by absences, by things unsaid. He can’t keep account of everyone; he can’t accommodate it all.

CHAPTER SEVEN PARIS, Summer 1941

It’s strangely cool for August. The sky is grey; the city is grey. There are grey-green uniforms on the café terraces around Odéon; German officers swing out of shops with little luxuries; they walk three abreast and take up the width of the pavements. Paris is a luxury they have allowed themselves; they indulge in it. They fill the city with their grey.

He makes his way through all of this as if it is not real. The occupiers are silent images projected upon the city. They slip over him without touching. He holds his own pictures, his own images of Germany, in his head: the cool spires, the mist and stillness of early morning, the fug of beer-halls, strong paint-spattered hands, a crook’s smile.

Remember this. The Germany you love.

He takes out his cigarette pack, touches the tip of his last cigarette. This morning — in one of the Jewish neighbourhoods — the police made a mass arrest. They have taken hostages for the new French State. He is scanning through that tally in his head, for friends who might have been at risk. He must go and check on the Léons, at the very least. He puts the cigarette packet away and turns the other way down the rue de Vaugirard, and it seems quite ordinary, workaday, but normality is now a skin stretched thin and it can split at any time.

He’s walking briskly, urgent with concern for his friends, when a young woman brushes past. She does a little half-skip to make headway. Her body doesn’t quite fill her dress and she has no stockings on, but she’s swinging along the pavement as though she’s glad to be alive. Charming, that, if quite deluded.

She falters, slows. He peers past her to see what she has seen.

There’s a hulk of grey-green on the corner. A knot of soldiers. For the time being they’re occupied with some lad who’s failed to show sufficient respect: he’s jostled, barked at; some German, some ugly French. His cap is sent spinning into the gutter. He scurries after it, ducks to scoop it up, then darts off down a side street; he’s gone. And then, amongst the soldiers, a fist knocks against an arm; a head jerks, a chin juts; eyes swivel round and watch the young woman approach.

An arm swipes at her. “Mademoiselle, your papers, if you please.” And she can’t refuse or turn away. She has not that right.

He’s in a rush, but fear slows time, so that one could feel the sluggish thud of one’s own blood as the papers are presented, shaking, and thick fingers receive the document. She is addressed in heavy French; the comments underneath are in German. He watches, approaching, as she blinks back and forth from one face to another.

He is passing her now, and her eyes follow him round, watching as she might watch someone else’s balloon drifting free up into the air.

His hands flex, grip. His thin boots plant the pavement and he is past her, and he has done nothing and is still walking on, and he can hear her voice crack with frustration: her papers are in order, she has to get home, she’s expected, her mother will be worried. These arrests, you see. And the heavily accented voices, the suggestion in French that they meet later to clarify the issue, perhaps over a drink. The German, muttered underneath, is a more intimate suggestion.

And he just keeps on walking. Against all instincts. Because what good would it do to intervene? What use do you imagine you could be?

No use whatsoever, Mother. No use to anyone at all.

He rounds the corner, teeth stinging, his jaw is clenched so tight. He blunders straight into another man.

A fumbled readjustment.

“Ah, excuse me—”

“Oh, hello—”

And it is Paul Léon himself, his light summer jacket neatly buttoned over a pristine shirt and a blue silk tie. He looks as though he has stepped straight out of those satellite years before the war.

“Paul.” They shake hands. “Thank God. I was just on my way to see you.” He touches Paul’s elbow, exerting gentle pressure, steering him away from the checkpoint.

They cross the road together and continue in the direction Paul had been going, but now on the far side of the street. They pass, with the expanse of cobblestones between them, the knot of soldiers and the young woman. She is really arguing now; her voice is shrill and insistent and the soldiers are getting fed up, shuffling; it’s not exciting now that she’s scolding them like a furious little sister. He sees the papers offered back and her grab them and stuff them away. She stalks off.

“I was worried, when I heard about the round-up,” he says.

Paul’s lips compress. “We plan to leave.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, my friend. We’ll leave as soon as the boy’s got his bachot.”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow.”

He nods. Good.

“Though I have to say, we’re not best pleased. Lucie particularly hates these déménagements. There is so much to organize, and it is so disruptive for the children, and for our work.”

“I know,” he says, though he knows he does not really know. Work is one thing, but children are entirely another. How one could look a life’s worth into the future and consider the prospect good enough to throw small people out to flounder round in it, to pin exams to them and think that it will matter. Instinct is powerful, he supposes. Blood and spunk and all of that, it pushes against sense. Love, perhaps.

“I still expect to see him,” Paul says.

It takes just a moment. “Do you?”

He tries to see Joyce here, now, a blind man with a stick, feeling his way along through Paris under occupation. Outraged at the inconvenience of it all.

“I knew he wasn’t well, but it just didn’t occur to me that he would die.”

“Fifty-eight,” he says. “It’s not old.”

“I thought maybe we would have another book from him,” Paul says.

“Really?” He can’t imagine what this book would be.

They approach the junction with the rue Littré. This is where Paul must turn, it seems, because he slows and offers out a hand.

“Ah well,” Paul says. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

“Be careful,” he says. “Please.”

They clasp hands. Paul gives him a smile and turns away, and ambles off. The stooped pale shape diminishing down the dim street, under the grey August sky.

—

It is the fascination of disgust, the way his attention is fixed on her and her lips as they move. The disgust of the green and pink twist of mouse innards left on the doorstep, the slime-thick hair teased from the plughole, the way that nails sink into the flesh of an overlooked pear. The lips forming on the words: those sales métèques. With their dirt and disease and lice and their disease and their dirt and their scheming, and their insistence on being where they are not wanted, their insistence on just being.

He turns himself away, watches the posters as the wind tugs at their corners. The easy lines of a dancer’s leg, the yellow and blue of a southern beach. Fresher, more recent layers of the palimpsest: children clustered round a stolid man in uniform: Populations abandonnées faites confiance, it reads, au soldat allemand!

The queue shuffles itself forward. He turns his collar up against the wet and tugs his hat brim down and shuffles forward too. His boots are leaking, unrepaired; his feet squelch.

Look at us, mugs that we are, queuing for hours in the rain, and in August, would you believe it! Dreadful summer that it’s been. And even then the bread not what it was.

Sawdust in the flour, her friend says.

Chalk.

Bad year for the grain.

But in the camps, oh ho, they just get everything handed to them. Out at Drancy and at Royallieu. They don’t know how lucky they are: three meals a day, all the bread they want, nothing to worry about, not like us. They don’t know they’re born.

Bad year for the grain, in that all the grain has been carted off to Germany. Bad year for the potatoes. And for the wine. And for the coal. He has a choice, of course; he doesn’t have to stay and listen to this. He could just step out of the queue. He could just walk away. And he could have a good go at tearing that poster off the wall as he passes. He could just keep on walking, walking like he used to, the long miles winding into the mountains, the wide spread of silence, with its markers of distant birdcalls and a farm-dog’s bark and sometimes a solitary car, the wind in their ears and their feet planted one after the other on the macadam, and then gravel, and then narrow trails of worn earth. The escape up to where everything was fresh and clean and clear.

But now the war is everywhere and he cannot walk away.

And — this of course bears consideration — Suzanne will tear strips off him if he comes home without their bread.

So he turns aside, his back against the wall, and smokes a cigarette. He thinks, you shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.

Dante is a consolation.

—

“But. No.”

Suzanne’s lips are compressed and her face is tight with distress. She nods. It’s true.

“But how did it happen? When?”

“There was another round-up this morning. He must have thought it was safe to be out, that it was all over and done with. So many people must have thought as much.”

“Christ.” He sits down. “Where’ve they taken him?”

Suzanne shakes her head. “Drancy, maybe?”

The world can collapse to this. To the inside of a truck, rattling across the cobblestones of Paris. To the crowded precincts of a camp. To the locked door and the barbed wire coiled across the sky. And the vile ignorance of fellow citizens, who begrudge you even this.

“How’s Lucie?”

Just another shake of the head.

His jaw is tight, his teeth stinging. He can feel the pressure of Paul’s hand in his, the lightly worn intelligence, that civility. The stooped figure diminishing down the street. They can’t do this. How can they do this? It’s just ridiculous, to lock up Paul Léon. It is an outrage. He’s on his feet, rebuttoning the coat he hadn’t yet removed, and is heading for the door.

“Where are you going?” Suzanne blinks at him, her eyes big and wet.

“I’ll go and see Lucie.”

“What can you do?”

“I’ll find out.”

—

Lucie has been crying. Her eyes are puffy and her mouth is smudged, but her face has been washed and powdered and when she speaks her voice is careful and measured. She holds herself erect.

She does her best to smile. She ushers him into the apartment, offers him a seat, has nothing else to offer. The children are not at home. Whatever else they are denied, they are still obliged to go to school.

“I’m so sorry, Lucie.”

In the sunny room of Shakespeare and Company, years ago: she was on Paul’s arm, her belly huge under a blue coat, and they were talking with Sylvia, and Lucie had laughed, he remembers the sight of her, and she had seemed almost luminous then, extraordinary beside her gangling husband. She’s a journalist, Sylvia had informed him in one of her gossipy confidences after the couple had left; she’s on the Paris desk of the Herald Tribune. And the husband has a couple of books under his belt too. Now the woman is creased and dimmed, her mouth twisted to a knot. And then her face crumples and she buries it in her hands. He reaches out towards her, then stops short. He tucks his hands between his knees, looks up at the unbleached square on the wall where a painting used to hang.

“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 VIVE LA FRANCE.

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.

The drawing room is murmurous; there is music playing on the gramophone: Beethoven, glorious Beethoven, captured in time and preserved in lines and grooves on black shellac, only to have nonsense talked over him. The shutters are open on the garden side of the house; they allow the low evening light in along with the cool air and the moths, which flutter softly through the room and paste themselves to walls and kill themselves in candle flames.

“Why are you frowning?” Suzanne asks.

“I’m not frowning.”

“Stop it, though.”

He sucks his teeth.

Mary comes over to them, kisses first Suzanne then him, a waft of scent and her cheek near his cheek. He watches as, with her curious grace, she pours them drinks. Her hair is falling a little longer now, less sharply cut. The crystal decanter catches the light and kicks it off around the room. He knows now, more or less, what had been left unsaid the last time they met. That she was, already, actively engaged in this.

“I’m afraid it’s just corn brandy now,” she says, handing a glass to him. “It’s all that I could get hold of.”

“No less welcome, thank you.”

They exchange enquiries about health, well-being; he asks after Marcel and the words are pond-skaters, treading the surface of things.

“New York, now. Chess.” She smiles, shrugs, bravely nonchalant. Marcel has toppled his king, left the play. This is a game he could see no way to win.

A touch on his arm. He blinks round, frowning — and there’s Alfy.

“That someone I wanted you to meet…”

He excuses himself, follows Alfy across the room towards a girl in a dark dress who’s peering round someone to watch him approach. She, also, is already somehow familiar.

He offers a hand; she takes it, stands on tiptoe to kiss his cheek.

“The Irishman. It is a great pleasure to see you again.”

“Enchanted,” he says, but, truth be told, he is put entirely on the back foot.

Jeannine Picabia. She must be, what? — twenty-four, twenty-five by now, though she still has the slightness of a teenager. He remembers her at her father’s studio, years ago. She sipped cordial and sat on the stairs. They’d talked about the paintings. He remembers the challenge of being soused, and trying to keep his words clear and straight, not breathing smoke and booze on her. Her cool, wry look.

“You must call me Gloria here.”

“Gloria?”

“Other names are for other places, other people.”

That look she gets from her father, at once earnest and playful.

“Gloria,” he says. “I will forget I ever knew anything else.”

“A selective memory is a very useful thing. Moby also says you can keep a secret.”

“Moby?”

She nods to Alfy. “Moby Dick here.”

He turns to Alfy, raises an eyebrow.

Alfy smiles. “My nom de guerre.”

“Because of your bitter, vengeful temperament?” he asks.

“I think my massive girth. Or perhaps it’s my complexion.”

Jeannine fishes out her cigarette case. She offers him, and he takes one. He thanks her, and sets down his glass to light her cigarette and then his. The hit of the Gauloise, after so much parsing out of cigarettes, is like learning to smoke all over again.

“Because most of Papa’s friends were all such — I think you say in Ireland — gobshites?”

This makes him snort.

“I mean, they would talk and talk and talk and talk. And everybody’s so busy talking nobody’s listening to anything at all, all those words and none of them getting heard, nobody ever learning a thing.”

“Artists,” he says. Shrugs.

“That’s no excuse.”

She blows smoke, taps her cigarette on an ashtray, lips twisted with pleasure, trying not to show it. One of Mary’s beautiful things, this ashtray. Ceramic, swirled inside with inky blue.

“Anyway, you I remember,” Jeannine continues. “You weren’t one of the talkers. You’d gather up far more than you’d ever give away. You have a silent habit.”

He takes a sip of brandy, feels its sting, its dispersal on the tongue. Feels disarmed, to have been observed like this from years ago. To have been already known.

“And this silence of yours is a virtue, like the selective memory, in our line of work.”

“I’m not,” he says, “a practical man.”

“But I still think you could be useful. Moby tells me that you know German and Italian and Spanish, as well as French and English.”

He tilts his head. This is true. “Some better than others.”

“And you can type.”

“Not terribly well.”

“It won’t matter.” Shifting on her feet a little, she looks up at him, bright and sharp. And he realizes that though they are supposedly in safe company, her voice has been falling, softening all this time, so that now she speaks almost in a whisper and he has to lean in closer to hear her.

“There are risks,” she says. “What we’re doing. It carries the death penalty now. These are anti-German acts. It is considered treason.”

“I know.”

“Are you still willing?”

“I am.”

She studies his expression, unsmiling. Then she says, “Well, we’ll keep you busy, Monsieur. You can be certain of that. It will help pass the time.”

He nods.

Alfy nudges him gently. “I did not like to ask it of you, my friend,” he says. “But I am glad that you are with us.”

“And you will need a codename now too, Irishman.”

He catches Suzanne watching them from all the way across the room. She closes her eyes in a slow blink and then she turns away.

What purpose can there be in pseudonyms, when they are all friends and acquaintances, when they have all known each other on and off for years?

—

They sit, chairs drawn up to a corner of the Pérons’ dining table. Mania and Alfy lay out scraps of paper on the tabletop. There were plums, brought up by a friend in the country; he has been given one, and has eaten it as slowly as he could. Now the stone is tucked into his cheek, and he shifts it on to his tongue from time to time and turns it over.

“Our job is information,” Mania says. “We don’t try to assassinate anyone; we don’t blow anything up.”

“Good.”

“Our network covers the north-western quadrant of France,” Alfy says. “We’re getting information about troop movements, trains and shipping. We watch the Boches. A new corps colour was spotted on troops in Saint-Lô on Wednesday. We had the information in Paris by Thursday afternoon, and over to London by the evening.”

Alfy drags his chair forward. He shifts around the paper slips on the glossy wood.

“We get the information in on these little scraps of paper. Little bits that can be easily kept hidden. We will pass these on to you. Your job is to sort the information. Look for patterns, duplications, where one informant substantiates another. Look for the big picture.”

“I see.”

“Once you’ve found it,” Mania says, “you make the big picture as small as possible. Boil it down until you have just the very essence. Because every extra word we send to London increases our exposure.”

“You could do it standing on your head,” Alfy says.

Alfy’s broad, good-humoured face. There was the Lycée and then there was the Army and now there is this. Alfy’s decisions seem the only reasonable responses to an unreasonable state of affairs. He contributes.

“Then you burn the source material, and you deliver your typescript, we’ll tell you where. And that’s it, job done.”

He asks, “How long have you two been involved?”

“A little while now,” Mania says quietly.

“You never said.”

“You didn’t ask.” Alfy shrugs. “And you’re a friend. It’s dangerous.”

He turns the plum stone with his tongue, feels the seam, the final threads of flesh.

“And you are not native here. So.”

“They try to make it be about country.” He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s really about country.”

Alfy leans away. Mania gives him a look, a smile.

“Last chance. If you want to back out now, before you get your hands dirty.” Alfy jerks his head towards the door. “I’ll see you for a beer, and we’ll get stuck into that translation and never say another word about this.”

He sits his ground.

“All right,” Alfy says, “so — and this is very important— just go on as normal, otherwise.”

Mania leans in. “Really, don’t change anything. You and Suzanne, just keep on as normal, and we’ll make it look as though your new work is just more of the old. If anybody’s watching you, they’ll have no grounds for suspicion.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Why’s that?” Alfy asks.

He twists his lips. Shrugs. “I’ll be glad to be of use.”

—

Suzanne refers to the drawer as the Tinderbox. Things could so easily spark and catch and burn the whole place to the ground.

Alfy comes round to the apartment with his satchel full of typescript and a French — English dictionary. If he’s stopped, they are working on the translation of Murphy into French.

The translation is getting nowhere.

The paper slips, though, are piling up; Alfy slides them from between the leaves of his dictionary, ruffles them out of his typescript. They fill up the drawer, dry and whispering like leaves.

He works at night, after curfew, the curtains drawn, observing blackout with all due diligence: one doesn’t wish to draw attention. He empties the drawer out on to his desk; the paper scraps scatter like a parlour game. He slides them around. Looking for patterns. Matching them. Finding echoes.

Cigarette papers, a torn-up flour bag. Some of them have been folded tiny and are now criss-crossed with creases, others have been rolled up into tight cylinders and must be rolled back on themselves to be flattened out. Sometimes there is a square of lavatory paper — quite a sacrifice — or the margin of a book, or a strip of advertising poster, the writing on the reverse, with the blocks of colour leaching through. Assembled there on the desk, these scraps of paper mark the movement of troops and materiel across the north of France.

And then, one day, on a dirty green omnibus ticket, five words appear in smudged graphite. Two of the same words are scratched on to the ripped-off corner of a menu; one of them is on a bit of paper bag; three are scribbled on to a panel of a cigarette packet. They are padded round and buffered with other stuff, but those same words keep emerging. He pushes his glasses back up to the bridge of his nose. In soft graphite and in neat hard pencil and in schoolteacherly copperplate and pragmatic print, the five words step forward to be noticed. They can’t be unnoticed now.

Four of the words are German. They are names of ships. Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen. One name is of a French port. Brest.

He sits there, fingertips on the bus ticket.

“What is it?” Suzanne asks. She sets aside her sewing, comes to him. “Have you found something?”

He lines up the ticket alongside the lavatory paper. She cranes in; he taps the ticket with a blunt nail.

She presses a finger on a cigarette skin and drags it across the table to line it up beside the ones he has already selected.

“Is that what you were thinking?” she asks.

He nods.

He knows the town. Waves slopping against a harbour wall; a round tower; old men dangling lines into the water; children chalking a game on to the pavement. And these words, lined up in front of him now, could conjure aeroplanes out of a clear sky, could bring all hell raining down on it. These words could take a hundred lives. A thousand.

“You’d only be passing it on,” she says.

He nods.

“It’s not as if you’d be adding anything, or changing it.”

He nods again.

“And if you don’t, and it might have done some good, if it could have helped bring things to an end, saved other lives…”

He closes his eyes. He breathes.

“Because you can’t be certain, can you?”

He shakes his head to clear it. He lifts a sheet of tellière, folds it and tears it sharply along the fold. He scrolls the half-page into his Olivetti. His fingertips peck out the letters, and the letters strike on to the paper, and the letters cluster into words, and the words seethe on the page, and he can’t bear this and yet it must be borne. He swallows down spittle, closes his eyes. All he can see is fire and blood and broken stone.

When he’s finished — it is only a few lines to type — he slips the sheet between two pages of his manuscript, which is by far the safest place to keep something that he doesn’t want anyone to read. He sweeps all the paper scraps together, then he gets down on hands and knees and checks the floor for drifting slips. He drags the table forward to be certain that nothing has been missed. He drops the crumpled scraps into the grate.

He sits back, rubs cold hands together, eases out his neck. “You want to share a cigarette?”

He holds the flame to a curled edge of paper. He watches it catch and flare, then drops it into the grate. He lifts the match and lights his cigarette.

He feels the smoke fill his lungs and soothe them, and his head spins; he passes the cigarette on to her. The smoke slips slowly from his lips, towards the fireplace, where it is caught by the draw of the chimney. Their drooping tent stands behind them. It’s as though they are camping out here on the floor.

With tired eyes, knees drawn up to her chin, she takes the cigarette. They watch the contagion of the flame, the way that black creeps across the white, then breaks into bits and falls in soft flurries.

“Alfy coming for the thing tomorrow?”

He shakes his head. “I’m to make the drop-off. Him coming and going here so much, it’s getting to look suspicious. He’s given me the address. Place over near Parc Montsouris.”

She holds her thin hands up to the brief warmth. “I don’t need to know.”

“I know.”

“Just,” she says, “be careful.”

The paper’s gone, its warmth spent, in just a few moments. He lifts a poker, stirs the ashes. The flakes fall through the grate, and he pulls the ash pan out to riddle through underneath, so that no word might remain allied to any other. So there is no suggestion that there were ever any words allied here at all.

“Now would be a good time to get raided,” he says.

“It’s never a good time to get raided.”

“It’s better than half an hour ago.”

“Don’t wish it down on our heads, for goodness’ sake.”

A little later, she says, “We should find something else to burn. Burning only paper might look suspicious.” The chill has descended again; her breath mists the air.

“We’re burning books, if anybody asks.”

“You could write one, instead,” she says.

“Ah yes. But who’d publish it?”

He leans against her, experimentally. She doesn’t shy away. He slips an arm around her shoulders. She shuffles closer on the rug. They smoke the cigarette down to nothing, then drop the nothing in a saucer, so that it can be unpicked and the filaments of tobacco can be teased into a roll-up, later, when the need will come.

—

There are not too many people in the Métro at this time of day. Which is just as well, since every single one of them is a police informer, and every single one of them is staring at him. Not unreasonably, either: his bag has swollen to the size of a suitcase, and his legs have grown too long for him, and his elbows stick out like coat-hangers. He is a crane-fly carrying a brick. A flamingo in charge of a wardrobe. Who wouldn’t stare?

He’s on the train now, and it lurches away, and he sits down and lays the bag on his lap and folds his hands on top of it and sways with the motion of the train. The familiar smell of diesel and cigarettes and bodies and perfume and the contained space hurtling through the dark make it feel more like Paris down here than the city above now does. In the corners and margins, if one doesn’t look too closely, Paris remains itself; the city lives on in its underground, in its catacombs; it has become its own reflection in the Seine.

He risks a glance around the carriage. A mother and son, neatly dressed, which isn’t easy nowadays. They’re not looking at him; the woman is murmuring something to the child. Across the aisle, an old lady in faded black sits with her old man beside her in working blue. Their tree-root hands lie in their laps, and they’re not, after all, staring at him either.

The darkness rushes by outside; his bag is hot under his hands. The torn half-sheet of typescript lies between two pages of his manuscript translation. And even through the heft of those pages, that one paragraph fizzes. It is charged like nothing else that he has ever written.

“I’ll be back by curfew,” he’d promised Suzanne.

“You better had be.”

And she had kissed him, and held him for a moment; then she had broken away and clattered up the steps into the little gallery bedroom and set about straightening up the bed. And he had closed the door on her and gone.

—

He climbs up the steps now at Denfert-Rochereau, out under the organic arch, blinking into the low sun. Head up but not too up; shoulders down but not too down. Walk as if it’s no effort whatsoever. Though his body is a puppet handed to an idiot. All jerks and tweaks and janglings. Nothing is easy or natural any more.

The air is clean up here at Montsouris — there’s so little fuel nowadays, so little traffic — and the late-afternoon autumn sun gives a nostalgic softness to the day. In this part of town there’s not the scruff-and-scramble of his stretch of the rue de Vaugirard, where a stranger can blend into the bustle; this area is terribly nice and so terribly quiet: he is as exposed as a louse on a bald head.

His heart is pounding by the time he finds the place. Up in the lift — thank God for the lift, so that he can breathe and breathe and breathe, and hold up his hand and watch it shake and will it not to shake, and find that his will has no effect at all on the shaking of his hand. He wishes for a bonbon, a bit of coltsfoot rock to suck, for the comfort of sugar. Ah, the girls, the almost-nieces. The tangled hair and T-bar shoes. Where are they now, this moment, as he stands at the strange apartment door and lifts his shaking hand and knocks in the particular way that he’s been taught to knock? Are they safe? For a moment there is no response to his knock, and he thinks, dreadfully, that he will have to go all the way back to the rue des Favorites with that bit of paper scorching a hole in his bag and melting the flesh off his leg. But then the door opens a crack, and there’s a smooth young handsome face, and big dark eyes studying him.

“Yes?”

“Jimmy?” he asks. “Jimmy the Greek?”

The young man says, blank, “Where’s Moby?”

“He can’t make it. I’m…I’m the Irishman, he must have said. I’ve got the…” He holds up the bag.

The eyes flash wide. “Mother of God. Don’t tell the whole fucking floor!”

Then the door is opened fully, and he is swiped at to come in.

—

Jimmy the Greek — his name’s not Jimmy and he’s not really Greek — double-locks the door behind them.

“Right then, let’s have it.”

He rests the bag on a knee, fumbles out the manuscript and shuffles the little half-sheet of tellière out from between the pages. Jimmy takes the paper off him. It must weigh almost nothing, but he’s lighter for it, instantly.

“You should hang around a while.” Jimmy’s already heading off down the corridor, the paper hanging like a bit of litter from his hand. “So it doesn’t look so much like a delivery.”

Down at the far end of the hall, Jimmy opens a door on to a heap of domestic clutter: brooms, mops, buckets, oilskins and duster-coats, tins, a pair of broken boots. Close up, there’s a reek of mothballs and shoe polish and borax and paint. A broom shifted out of the way, Jimmy drags the coats aside, and where there should be the back wall of the cupboard, there’s a void. Photographic gear is ranged on the shelves, bottles and trays are laid out on a card-table. A little botched-together darkroom. Jimmy reaches inside, lifts down his camera. With all the cleaning products, even the smell of photographic chemicals will be masked.

“Used to be a hobby of mine,” Jimmy says, and shrugs, because now it could get him tortured, and then shot.

In the main room of the apartment, the high windows are hung with voile, screening the room and letting in a cool white light. The young man’s hands are deft as he works, clearing the table, smoothing out the white cloth. The cruciform grey shadow of the window frame lies across it. Then, nearby, a floorboard creaks. He swings round — the dividing doors are blank behind him.

“Who else is here?”

“Nobody.”

Then a truck roars along the avenue below, and Jimmy bends over the document with his camera, and the shutter clicks, and the autumn sun and the shadows and a moment’s silent time and the words that he has sifted out of all those other words on the paper slips, the words that he has decided are the ones that matter most, the words that he has typed out with his pecking fingertips—Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Prinz Eugen, Brest—are captured on film.

—

When it happens, it happens by accident. They stumble their way into sex, too cold, too tired, too hungry to set out for it deliberately, and yet too starved of other pleasures to deny themselves or each other this. Sex has become more acquiescence than an active choice; a why not shrug, rather than an urgent yes.

Few clothes come off. Perhaps a scarf, but only when it twists too tight and a little slackness must be tugged into it before things can continue. Buttons are undone. Fabric is parted, rucked up, pushed aside. Only what is necessary is uncovered; there is no will or energy for more. Underneath the clothes, new downy hair is growing on slack skin. Fleshless, the body insulates itself against the cold.

Movement disarranges the blankets; skin prickles with gooseflesh. She grumbles, tugs at the covers. He mumbles an apology and rolls away from her, and she sighs, and it is over, and it will have to do.

Planes climb into the sky; they grind over the chalky hills and crumbling shores and out over the creases of the waves; glazed with starlight, their muzzles slip through banks of muffling cloud, and back into the clear. They press towards the lip of this other land, where it juts into the sea.

The two of them lie in stillness, spent. The wet of his eyes is cold when he blinks in the darkness. The apartment is quiet. The street outside is quiet, after curfew; nobody is about. They breathe. Underneath the blankets, she tugs her skirt back down again. He pulls his combinations back and buttons up. They lie unspeaking, thoughts chewing on themselves.

Three hundred and twelve miles away, the night is torn in shreds; it streams with flame, and metal screams and splits, and bricks slither, and the water burns.

And he lies awake. He blinks up at the ceiling. She turns on her hip and is breathing softly into sleep. His thoughts are tangled, will not resolve themselves. Hunger and fatigue and the ache in his chest, and the cold and the old man in the song, dancing barefoot on the ice. And the harm that might come. From what he’s done, from the words that he has chosen, and for the direction in which he has sent them.

—

Alfy brings the papers.

The papers pile up, and fill the drawer, and lie there dry and silent as fallen leaves. He spills them on his table, slides the scraps around. Matching them. Finding echoes. Looking for patterns. He translates, redacts, transcribes. He burns up the little slips. He takes the document to Montsouris, to be photographed, or Alfy takes it.

And Alfy brings more papers.

The papers pile up in the drawer. He pours them out, shuffles them around, a puzzle to be solved.

They go on as normal. They don’t change anything. They go to concerts together at the Opéra; he takes himself off to exhibitions. He buys a new notebook — a pre-war, silken thing — and tries to write. He goes to see Alfy, because he’s always gone to see Alfy. From time to time he passes the same man on the landing or stairs. A priest: fleshy smile, black soutane and an incongruous whiff of cigars. He doesn’t think to mention it to Alfy. There are many other apartments in the building; most likely a priest would be calling on somebody else. Life becomes a parody of itself: the walk to the shops, the drink in a café, the sketchy meals taken together, the conversations about anything other than what presses hardest on them. It is all self-conscious and unreal: there is always the possibility of an audience; everything is open to scrutiny and question. As he considers, in the Galerie Louis Carré, hands behind his back, some recent paintings by Rouault, he knows that he too might also be considered. The pictures are few and small and good, and he is captured by L’Hiver, where the roads are white and the land is dun and yet seems to be back-lit, glowing; the trees stand like gibbets by the roadside; figures trudge through the winter landscape, heads bent and hooded, rag-shod, all in couples apart from one shambling man who trudges off alone. The world is cold. He closes his eyes; the image is there like the afterburn from a bright window, exquisitely bleak. He takes a deliberate moment to remember it, to store up its loveliness. He is hoarding. These are famine times.

When he opens his eyes again, he turns his gaze to the parquet, resists the urge to cast around him. If he is being watched, let them make of this what they will. There are some needs he won’t subdue.

And a year passes. And it goes on. His hands shake less now when he goes to make the drop. The bag no longer swells to the size of a wardrobe. And it all becomes normal, more or less, because anything can become normal, more or less, given time.

CHAPTER NINE PARIS, August 1942

A telegram is a dreadful thing.

The flat is empty. It’s the emptiness of a tea-tin; there are fragments, flakes of what’s usually there caught around the seams: a pair of gloves, a hairpin on the mantelpiece, a needle-case.

Suzanne did tell him where she was going; he knows she did. He had looked up from his book and he had said, Till soon, and Take care. But he hadn’t really listened and he really should have really listened, because it matters now, this coming-and-going, now there is a telegram icy in his hand, and the boy is staring at him boggle-eyed, and he doesn’t know where Suzanne is, and if he had listened he would know, and he needs to find her now this minute. He needs her here already. Jesus Christ.

He counts coins into the dirt-creased palm; the boy blinks at him, then clatters off down the stairs, a clumsy gait, the wooden soles of his shoes flashing with nails. To have growing feet at a time like this. To want to run, and to be stuck with those wooden things.

He strips away the envelope.

She’d been standing at the door, putting her hat on, checking her reflection in the little mirror. She’d said, I’m just popping out to…I’m calling round at…I’ll be back by…

His hands are shaking. He doesn’t want to open it.

The printed words are clear; he stares and does not see; he refuses them, and yet they prickle through and make themselves known.

ALFRED ARRESTED BY GESTAPO

PLEASE TAKE THE NECESSARY STEPS TO CORRECT THE ERROR

MANIA PERON

Alfy.

Oh good God, Alfy.

He’ll go to Mania. And the boys. There must be something he can do. God knows what, but he’ll — there must be—

He is scooping up his keys, stringing his scarf round his neck, the telegram now crumpled in his fist — but then stops. He flattens out the paper, stares at the printed tape again, because—

The telegram doesn’t actually say what it might have said.

It doesn’t say, Come and help me.

It doesn’t say, Go and help him.

It says, take steps to correct the error.

He chews his lip. What does she mean?

Because Mania is sharp as a knife. And she will be thinking fast, and she’ll be furious, frustrated, just as he is, because they don’t have a code, they didn’t even think to agree a code for this, or for any emergency. Everyone knows the telephone lines are tapped. Even a telegram is read by both operators, and by anybody standing at the operator’s shoulder. Mania is trying to communicate with them without incriminating anybody — not them, not herself, and least of all Alfy.

What error?

And where is Suzanne? He grabs his coat and heaves it on, but then stalls. If he goes out looking, he might miss her, and then where would they be? She’d be here waiting for him while he was dodging round the streets and friends’ apartments, while the Gestapo were putting on their gloves, straightening their caps and getting in their cars.

Time. Happening everywhere and all at once. It is a bastard for that.

He chews at a hangnail, pulls it off between his teeth. His finger bleeds.

Suzanne. Come on, Suzanne. Come home.

—

“They’ve taken Germaine too, and Legrand.”

“Christ.”

“We are betrayed.”

Suzanne’s face is open as a wound. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Perhaps their names are also on the list. Perhaps the Geste are already on their way round here. He goes over to the window, peers down at the street. And even if they are not yet on the list, then they will be soon. So many friends arrested. A dark room; chains and pliers. None of it bears thinking about, and yet all of it must be thought.

“Anybody out there?” she asks.

“Not a soul.”

He realizes now what it was, that error that must be corrected. It is the misapprehension under which they had been living all along — that they could just go on like this, that it would continue. They had not realized that the world would one day just crumple up and blow away. But the apartment is made of paper, and the streets are botched-up stage-flats and the wind blows right through it all and it creaks and strains. It’s not safe here. It never was. That’s what they must correct: their deluded sense that things will just go on.

“Do you think Alfy would…?”

His stomach heaves. Yell my name the first chance you get, Alfy old son, spill the fucking beans, cough it all up. Give ’em chapter and verse, inside leg and shoe-size, before you lose a single fingernail on my account. Don’t you take one cigarette burn for me, God love you. Alfy. God love you.

“No. I don’t know. But he’s only one. So.”

“We have to warn everyone,” she says. “Everyone we can. And then we have to get away from here. I’ll run round to Hélène’s.”

“I’ll phone Jimmy and the others.”

“Watch what you say.”

“Of course.”

She shoulders her bag. He crouches to knot a broken bootlace.

“Have you any change?” he asks. “I gave my last to the telegraph boy.”

She fumbles in her purse, tips coins into his palm.

“Be careful,” he says.

Suzanne opens the door out on to the dim landing, then pauses on the threshold and looks back at him, in all this rush and fluster, as he gathers up his things.

He raises an eyebrow at her. What?

“I keep wishing you had not come back,” she says. “I wish you weren’t here, you know. Every moment. But I still don’t want you gone.”

—

He huddles in the telephone booth. It smells of polish, tobacco smoke and other people. He dials number after number. Number after number rings out unanswered, in rifled apartments with overturned desks and papers half-burned in the grate, where the rugs are rippled by struggles, by sliding feet; its ringing can be heard on landings, where a door, forgotten in the tussle, has been left ajar.

He asks the operator for the number Jimmy the Greek had given him. Only for emergencies. He listens to the clicks and fuzz on the line. Then it rings.

The phone rings and rings and rings and rings. And there is no reply.

And then a clatter at the other end — the mouthpiece lifted.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

No reply to this.

“The Irishman.”

The stark insufficiency of that pseudonym. He can hear Jimmy’s breath on the mouthpiece, listens for a click, a hum, some indication that the line is being tapped. No code, no fucking code; how can they have got this far without a code? What he would give now for a word that to just the both of them meant, The Gestapo are on to us, destroy the evidence, get your things together and get away.

There is just the thin glass panel between him and the lobby. The concierge is very carefully not looking at him, very deliberately not noticing. She is pushing a broom around the floor. He clears his throat, speaks into the receiver.

“I telephoned to let you know, my friend, I find I am very busy at the moment.”

Jimmy’s voice comes intimate and soft. “What a coincidence. So do I.”

“And I think I must expect to be so for the foreseeable future, so I shall not be available—”

“I believe that will be much the same for me.”

“Many of my acquaintances are also very busy at this time.”

Another pause. “Mine also.”

“Well, until we are more at our leisure, then.”

“Yes,” Jimmy says. “Until then.”

“Goodbye,” he says. “Good luck.”

He sets the mouthpiece down on the stand, rests his forehead against the panel above. He lets a breath go. Then he fumbles in his pocket for more change. He begins again to dial.

—

He closes the apartment door behind him and it is sugar-glass. It is barely there at all.

“Suzanne?” He hears the shake in his own voice.

She clips down the steps from the mezzanine, her coat on, piled clothing in her hands, shopping bag on her shoulder. No time for courtesies, endearments. She sets the folded clothes on the arm of the sofa, says, “Where’s your bag?”

“Eh?”

“You know, that dreadful old satchel thing of yours.”

He finds it — he didn’t know she didn’t like it — hanging on a peg underneath his other jacket. He hands it to her. She slides his manuscript from the drawer into the bag.

“I was too late,” she says over her shoulder.

“What?”

“They’ve got Hélène.” She turns back to him. Her eyes are brimming, but she is still all briskness. “The Geste were there, in her apartment, when I arrived.”

“Jesus.”

He moves towards her; she just shoves his bag into his hands.

“But they let you go…,” he says.

“I played the innocent. I said I had called round to see about her cat.”

“Oh God, that bloody cat.”

She lifts the pile of clothing from the arm of the settee. “I sorted this for you. Underwear, sweater, shaving gear.”

“Thanks.” He just stands there, holding his bag in a bundle, feeling the weight of his manuscript.

“Clothes. Now. Please.”

Yes. Of course. He opens up the bag so that she can stuff them in.

“Are you going to be all right in those boots?” she asks.

He glances down at them. “The others are worse.”

“Right then. Well. They’ll have to do. Come on.”

He follows her out on to the landing. He fumbles with his keys, turns back to the door. He locks up. His hand shakes. His face feels tight and hard. He wonders if they will ever be here again. They head down the stairs. Brisk, light, but deliberately not running. They might pile straight into the Gestapo coming up to find them. They must not look as though they are trying to escape.

“We’re popping out for a stroll, we’ll stop at a café,” she says back over her shoulder. “Tell yourself it’s an ordinary day.”

Their hands skim down the bannister.

“Where will we go?” he asks. “Do you have any notion?”

“A friend of mine; he’ll help us.”

“What friend?”

Even in all this, that little sour twist of jealousy. They’re in the lobby. She drops her voice still further, speaks over her heaving breath.

“You’ve met him, at those evenings. Michel. You remember?”

He shakes his head. Maybe.

“It’s what he does. He helps people.”

Right. He holds the porte cochère, peers out. The street is clear. She ducks through; he follows. He offers his arm and she takes it. The door slams shut behind them on the lobby and the staircase spiralling up seven floors to the flimsy door locked on silent space and the dust falling on books, and on the floorboards, and on the heavy dark hand-me-down table that Nora Joyce had given him, on Mein Kampf and his battered coffee pot and his ashtray dusted with tobacco ash, and the drooping canvas tent and the Turkish rug.

They walk along the street together, their arms linked, carrying shopping bag and satchel, as ordinary as the day itself. They don’t know where they’re going, but they go.