A Country Road, a Tree

CHAPTER TEN PARIS, August 1942

The grandfather clock ticks. One weight sinks, its chain mumbling through blunt teeth, teasing cogs around. Somewhere in its innards something clunks and shifts, and it begins to chime the quarter-hour.

Which makes it a quarter past three.

He fans his toes, flexes his ankles.

Which makes it a quarter past three, on Friday, the twenty-first of August, nineteen forty-two.

If the clock is right.

He rolls his head softly side-to-side. He can still make these small movements. And while he can, it seems important that he does. When he turns his head to the left, there is light pouring down through a knothole, and beyond it shafts through the gaps between the boards, where sometimes dust too falls in tiny streams. When he turns to the right, there is a black rectangular patch over the floorboards, and this is the rug, which covers the loosened planks where they can clamber out, at those times when they can be out. There is all this, and there is the old man lying next to him.

He’s got used to the various and mingled smells by now. The old man’s and his own. He barely notices the body odour, the bad breath — it’s only when one of them lets out a particularly rancid fart — bad food, and the acid from not having enough of even bad food that makes your stomach eat itself and turns your guts to treacle — that a smell is particularly noticeable. Interesting, to see what one can become accustomed to.

The old man has an enviable capacity for sleep. His breast, under his white beard, falls and rises softly. His face is fascinating: the way the skin slides from his cheekbones and forehead and gathers in concertinas at his ears, leaving the skull visible at the eye sockets and the bridge of the nose. Raising his head a little, he can peer down the length of their parallel bodies and see the old man’s feet, bootless, one yellow toe poking through a grey sock.

Sometimes the old man snores. He lets him snore and does not nudge him.

He can himself, sometimes, if he’s very lucky, drift out of consciousness for a bit. A swooping fall, a card-sharp rush of images, one replacing the other before any single one of them can be understood. Then he’s jerked back, blinking at the boards above his head.

He raises his shoulders to his ears, the blades sliding up the boards beneath him and back down again, like failing wings.

It is not so bad, not really. It is not so bad.

Sometimes, when the old man is awake, he combs his beard with his fingers and mutters to himself. He’s Russian. What he’s saying could be prayers, or he could be telling stories, or he could simply be reminding himself of better days. But the old man has a listener, alert for patterns, names, anything familiar, trying to pin the sounds down into sense.

He is learning Russian in the gap between the ceiling and the floor.

It is not going quickly.

But then there is no rush.

It is a relief when the old man starts up his muttering. It helps to pass the time.

Other things are passed too, down there between the ceiling and the floor. A bottle stands between them. She leaves it down there empty, retrieves it once it has been used. One unbuttons one’s fly and shuffles about and inches up on elbows and pisses with great difficulty, while the other fellow turns his head away, or is, often enough, already asleep. He finds that, all in all, he feels fondly towards the old fellow. He is a gracious pisser and a courteous sleeper; he does not fart as much as might be supposed. If one must have company, this is not bad company to have.

There are also hours spent in the house itself, with the wireless on, the wife and husband home and nobody else expected. The old man sits in the corner by the grandfather clock, and he himself, a fifth wheel, tries to stay out of the way as well as stay away from the windows. This is when the day is done, the shops downstairs empty, and it is to be expected that there will be people at home. Even the slightest out-of-the-ordinary occurrence is questionable now. It only takes a word from a concerned citizen about strangers in the building, or figures moving around a supposedly empty apartment, and they are done for.

So they talk in hushed voices; he stretches out his legs, eases the clicks out of his knees. They share their bad food with him. He joins them at the table for sulphurous stews of turnip and cabbage and beans. He eats little, is constantly hungry. Hunger is normal. You can get used to it, to its incremental twist. In hiding, he can no longer claim his rations, and beyond a little money for off-ration things like blood pudding and root vegetables, he has nothing to contribute here. He just consumes, and excretes, and is dependent on the family to deal with both. He feels the indignity of that; it renders him just animal.

He shaves at the stone sink. He looks at himself in the scrap of mirror, at the angles of his bones. He’s no more than a few miles across town from his apartment, but it might as well be another country, since he cannot go back there. He sees in himself now a quality of the patients he’d met at the Bethlem hospital, that time Geoffrey Thompson had taken him to look round. They’d roam the corridors, disoriented and hopelessly lost, but never more than a few yards from their beds.

Geoffrey Thompson. How he’s getting on, now? He’ll be busy; he’ll be rushed off his blessed feet, now that the whole world has gone mad.

He scrapes away the stubble, leaves his top lip unshaven. He is growing a moustache. It’s good to have a hobby.

For Suzanne, he wishes daylight, air, the occasional cup of coffee. He wishes her to be safe. They have been separated, so as to be less conspicuous. They will be returned to each other when their new, fake papers have been achieved.

He listens to the Russian but he thinks in French, in its uncompromising precisions, and in German, its words fitting themselves together like links in a necklace, and in Italian, which falls through his thoughts as smooth as drops of water. He strokes that new moustache and thinks in English too; his thoughts assemble themselves in its measured blocks. An English sentence is a brick. To build with, yes, a solid structure; something one can inhabit. But also a dividing wall, a closing-off; a limitation.

—

The chap has a mouse-brown suit and an old Mossant fedora gone dark around the band where he has sweated through it. His chin is shaven shiny. He hands over the new papers, then dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief; his line of work is enough to make anybody sweat. They step out into the corridor. He glances back — the apartment is empty for the day. The old grandfather is asleep beneath the floor. He closes the door behind him. He will not have the chance to say goodbye. To say thank you. For the bad food, and the floorboards, and the risk that they have undertaken on his behalf.

He pockets his papers. They clip down the stairs and out of the doors into the street.

“Where are we heading?”

“Hotel in the Fifteenth.”

“Will Suzanne be there?”

A brisk nod. A gesture of impatience: they have to get a bloody move on if they are to get there before curfew. They also have to look as though they’re not in any hurry whatsoever.

They are approaching a tram halt when they spot the gendarmes on board, checking papers; they duck down a side street. But then there is a checkpoint on the rue des Ombres, which they swerve again to avoid. There’s a long loop round through back streets and alleyways, and they find themselves in the leafy haut-bourgeois Sixteenth, not far from the Bois de Boulogne, where nobody is ever in a hurry, where women snuggle into their furs and feed their tiny dogs on black-market ham, and time ticks slow and weighs a ton, and half the apartments are locked up and empty, their owners gone to the country.

He knows that they look very out of place indeed. In their worn and grubby suits they look like a couple of housebreakers. Unsuccessful ones.

The shadows are long and the sun is low; the air is filling up with darkness like smoke.

“Today’s Tuesday…,” he says.

“Yep.”

And so the world goes on, and time keeps passing. Tick-tock. Tuesday slides into Wednesday, and Wednesday crumbles into Thursday and for a good while Thursday seems solid and secure, but inevitably it too shivers and falls and Friday is triumphant, and what he really needs to do is notch it up, note it down, tick it off, keep a tally of the days, to notice time as it is passing, because he fears he is losing his grip on it, and there can be no break, no abeyance, no lacuna: time ticks by and it is their time, his and everybody else’s, and what they do in it, and with it, is not separate and distinct from before and afterwards; it is a continuation, and it must be acknowledged as such; time will have to be reckoned with eventually. And so he must check and clarify and notice. He will not let himself come adrift from it.

They turn the corner.

“Oh, the cow.”

There’s a checkpoint. Police glance at papers, ask lazy questions of two plump matrons in their furs.

“Nice area for it.”

“Bluff it out?”

Sucked teeth. It’s a risk.

Their stride is already shortening, their pace slackening off. The matrons will soon be sent on their way: they can’t have anything to hide. There’s money in their purses; they’re wearing furs. Of course they’re law-abiding; the laws suit them.

“C’mon,” the chap says, and they turn and cross the street. “We’ll head through the park.”

—

Between the trees it’s already so much darker. Gravel crunches underfoot.

“Which way?”

“If we head round to the Place de Colombes, then double back, we should be all right.”

“Good. Come on.”

The man’s really sweating now, trotting to keep up alongside his lope. The setting sun shafts through the trees, and over the open glades a faint mist rises. There’s just their ragged breath — he has no stamina nowadays — and the crunch of gravel, and birds settling in the trees, and something rustling through the shrubbery.

“With any luck,” the man says, “people will think we’re out chasing whores.”

“That still happens here?”

“More than ever. If there’s any truth to rumour.”

But luck is an unlucky word; said out loud it just dissolves. Because only a moment later they hear the dogs.

Barrel-chested barking. A pair of them, at least; maybe more. These are not some sclerotic old pugs out for an airing. These are big dogs, hounds.

“You hear that?”

“It’s nothing.” They come to a fork in the track; he heads towards the left-hand path. “It’s not to do with us.”

But a hundred yards further on, they hear the voices. Somewhere ahead and off to the right: between them and the maze of city streets. They are speaking German.

“Last seen headed across the Place de la Porte…”

They stop dead. He can feel his breath dragging in his chest. He presses a hand to his scar.

“…must presume they entered the park.”

He looks to the little man, who shakes his head; he doesn’t understand. “What are they saying?”

He waves a hand to shush him, listening.

“…start by the lake and sweep across. We’ll send the dogs round the other way.”

The little man raises his hands, nonplussed. What to do?

He finds himself in charge. A low jerk of the arm: come on.

One of the dogs lets out a howl and others join it. Voices call back and forth between the trees. There are footfalls on the track behind them: more than one person, gaining on them.

They peel off the pathway, duck under the low boughs, dodge between the trees. Fallen leaves, dry branches: the noise of their passing is agonizing. It is impossible, though, to go silently.

They slip round the thick trunk of a sycamore and hunker down. The colour is seeping from the world.

“Split up?” the man breathes.

“Do you think?”

“Halves the chances of being caught.”

“Doubles it?”

A dog bays; they flinch down, speak very low.

“Closer.”

“Think so.”

“Have you got anything?”

He doesn’t follow. “Cigarette?”

“No. If they get their hands on you.” A heave of breath. “For that.”

“Oh. No. Have you?”

A nod. “I don’t think mine will stretch.”

The man leans back against the trunk, his belly heaving like a frog’s, and closes his eyes.

He, though, hunkered down in the fallen leaves, looks round him, rubbing at his arms. He feels the chill. He doesn’t want this. He can’t face this. The words feel childlike, Boy’s Own:

“We could swim the lake,” he says. “Doesn’t that put dogs off a scent?”

The man’s eyes open, his irises black in the half-light. “And if we got away from this lot, we’d just get picked up by the next patrol. Soaked through, in the Sixteenth.”

“There is that.”

Then eyes widen: boots thud past behind them along the footpath they’ve just left. They hold their breath. Just one man, going at a run; he’s gone, and the breath slides out of them again.

“Have you got much you can give them?” the man asks.

He swallows. “A bit.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? People. People you can hurt.”

“People are always the problem.”

The fellow sinks down off his hunkers so that he’s now sitting on a root. He draws his knees up. The noise seems to be coming from all directions now, men and dogs, and with it the scrape of torch beams through branches, tree trunks, the failing light. They’re done for, surely.

“I can’t see how we can be worth all this madness.”

Still on his hunkers, he rests a hand, fingers tented, on the bole. He peers around through the trees; he glances back towards the path. They can’t move. They can’t stay where they are. They can’t both kill themselves, and he for one finds that he would much rather survive the night. Suzanne is waiting for him, and will be annoyed if he does not show up. So what’s left? The grained, elephantine bark beneath his fingertips. His eyes slide upward, through drooping branches and the fading rusty leaves, right up into the canopy of the sycamore. It is dim in the gathering dusk and still thick with foliage. Head tilted back, his balance fails and he has to steady himself. The set of his features changes; the lines shift around his eyes.

He turns back towards the little man, taps knuckles against his arm.

Eyebrows up, his expression: What?

He jerks his head upward.

The man twists his head to peer up along the rising height of the tree. His Adam’s apple rolls down then back up his throat. “I don’t like heights,” he says.

He, though, unfolds himself, looks upward, dusting off his hands. A moment, then the other man gets stiffly to his feet. They stand side-by-side, a pair of schoolboys considering the climb. There are strong drooping branches, but they’re only low enough to get hold of at some distance from the tree, leaving one out, as it were, on a limb. Close to the trunk, nothing’s within easy reach, at least for the smaller man. So the only thing for it: back set to the tree, a cup made of his palms, he offers a boost. The other fellow swallows queasily, but sets a boot in the hands and is heaved upward. A grab for the lowest bough, a foot on his shoulder, then the weight is gone and the other fellow’s scrambling up amongst the branches. He leaps for the lowest branch and pulls himself up after, satchel swinging.

The little man clambers up a few branches and then stops, and shakes his head at the notion that he might go any higher. A pat on the shoulder, and then the reach and swing that is so long ago and so familiar, the memory buried in his muscles and his nerves. Even the sting of the palms. He remembers that.

Perched high above, his back to the trunk, astride a beam, he tucks his dark muffler over the pale line of his shirt collar, tugs his sleeves down over his cuffs; they are more grey than white but they would still show up in a flashlight. He hooks his arm around a higher branch, tucks his bag close and ducks his nose down into his scarf. It’s all right, actually.

Across the woods, saplings and undergrowth shiver with movement; he can hear the crunch and thrash of men through the brushwood; flashlights swipe across the dark.

He chews at the inside of his cheek. He closes his eyes. Takes himself away to this: the white road gleams under the travellers’ ragged feet, and the dun field glows, and the sky above is a translucent slate-blue; the delineation brisk, the outlines strong; the whole thing is as luminous as a stained-glass window. The light of that other world beyond shines through for Rouault, as it cannot shine for him.

When he opens his eyes again, he can still see the bundle of the man below him, clinging to the trunk like a fungus.

The dark gathers; it rises from the earth like groundwater. Above, the stars prick through. It’s getting cold. He shifts, resettles himself. He eases out the ache in his neck. The wind stirs the tree, and the branch heaves and the trunk sways and the leaves rustle and clouds scud across the sky. The voices come and go. The dogs are distant, then nearer again. He dozes, wakes. Suzanne will be annoyed. He lays his cheek against his arm and dreams.

He falls, arms spread, through the painless brush of branches and the soft caress of twigs and needles, and it is all perfectly pleasant while he falls, but when he hits the ground he will be dead.

He blinks awake. His eyes open on the drop: fifty foot to the bare ground. He has slumped forward in his sleep, his whole weight hangs from that one arm. Between him and the root-troubled earth is the hunched form of his friend, still clamped to the bole. It’s lighter now; the night is fading into day and they are both still there. Still ticking on.

He shifts his grip, struggles himself up. His arm has gone to sleep and his chest aches. He clambers down until he is alongside his friend, one hand on a higher branch, one foot dangling, perched neatly.

“How’s it going?” he asks.

The man peels his face from the trunk; he blinks. His cheek is printed with bark. He smells musky. He doesn’t speak.

“You stiff?”

A slow blink. The fellow’s eyes are glazed; he doesn’t seem to be taking anything in.

“All right, old chap. Help you down. If you could just—”

But his friend just lays his face against the trunk again, and does not move.

But it is really, really time to go. Before the early-morning dog-walkers notice them; before the search party turns up and has another go. What to do? He climbs down one branch so he is below now, and turns his face away from the smell of urine.

“Just give me your foot, there’s a good chap. Just in my hand.”

The man shakes his head.

“Come on now; it’s a simple affair. I used to do it all the time as a boy; I bet you did too.” This is something of a lie: he climbed up trees all the time. He rarely had to trouble himself with climbing down.

The voice is tacky and dry. “I don’t like heights.”

“I know, I know, I see that. But…” The boot in his hands now. “Try.” He coaxes the boot off the joint of branch and trunk where it is wedged, and pulls it lower. His friend remains stiff and resistant.

“All right?”

“No.”

But the foot shakingly descends.

They inch their way, foothold-handhold, foothold-handhold, down to the lowest bough. He drops loosely to the ground and turns to coax the smaller man to drop; he staggers backward with him in his arms.

“And there we are. Terra firma.”

The man looks around him vaguely. He rubs his face, digs at his closed eyes. “We’ll go…we’ll go to…the hotel.”

“One moment.”

Leaving his friend there by the sycamore, he strides off into the bushes, unbuttons, and pisses long into the mulch.

—

They scuff through the dawn streets. He is unkempt, unshaven, self-conscious and on the qui vive and trying not to look like it. The other fellow is shuffling along half a pace behind him, walking stiff-legged because of his damp and chafing trousers, and he can’t be made to keep up. He’s muttering to himself now, and from time to time waving an arm: we go this way; I think it’s this way — no, I don’t know. Oh shit, I don’t know, what are we going to do…?

It’s not good, wandering. One may walk, of course, but one must have a purpose to one’s walk. The tramps have all gone; the flâneurs have given up. One walks to get where one is going, or one stays at home. Which is why the two of them — he a great gangling streak of piss, his friend a waddling puddle of it — make as conspicuous a couple as Laurel and Hardy in these Paris morning streets, and are drawing almost as much attention from the street-sweepers and the bin men and the delivery boys.

They find a café just off the rue Grenelle and order coffee. He mentions the inconvenience of having missed the last train home the previous evening: it really breaks his feet, you know. His friend just drinks his barley coffee in hot mouthfuls and won’t be coaxed into better spirits. Hotel, wash, a change of clothes and a comfortable bed; a good sleep; feel so much better after that. No response beyond a blink, a nod. They settle up, and they stumble out again into the cold daylight.

“Now then, my friend, not far.”

But what if Suzanne is gone? And what if she is still there, and furious with him?

—

The hotel is the kind of hotel you’d find on any street in Paris. The paint is faded and peeling, and the windows are filmed with street dirt. A thin woman in a dull dress slips in behind the counter and opens up the register; a girl pauses with her broom to watch them pass. She sucks a finger.

His head is swimming with fatigue. His eyes feel as though they have been sandpapered. The woman hands him a form to fill in. He takes the stub of pencil. He can’t remember what his name is supposed to be.

The little man shuffles up beside him, licks his lips. “Your papers.” Meaning, the new name is there and he can copy it.

He fumbles his card out and lays it open on the counter, facing the receptionist. He reads his new name upside-down, licks the pencil tip and glances down the list in the guest book — and there it is. Suzanne’s handwriting; a new faked name. Signed in yesterday and — he scans across the column — out again early this morning. While he was swilling ersatz coffee in that steamy little café, she was taken on somewhere else, Lord knows where. When he finally catches up with her, she is going to be so cross.

He prints; he signs. What to do now? How does he go about finding her?

“D’you have any matches?” the other fellow asks, out of nowhere.

He frowns round at him.

“Matches. You used to see them, didn’t you, in places like this? Bowls full of matchbooks, just lying out on the counter. And sweets sometimes; heaps of bonbons.”

He slides the guest book over. “I’ll give you a light in a minute.”

“Your room will be on the fourth floor,” the woman says. “It’s nice and quiet.” She turns back with the key, then barks past them, “Marthe, don’t stand around gawping. Hop to it, girl!”

The girl jumps. She shunts the broom along.

—

They climb long slow stairs to their room, getting lightheaded with the climb. But the room is a room, and so much better than a tree for being comfortable in. It is full of light. They close the shutters, and close the windows, and close the curtains, and shut the daylight out. He unlaces and pulls off his boots. He sinks back on one of the narrow beds; it creaks and sags into a pit.

His friend perches on the end of the other bed, nearer the window. The counterpane creases under his weight. He is still wearing his damp trousers. But he is busy smoking now. He finishes his cigarette and lights another from the glowing tip of it; smoke spools upward, oozes from his lips. You’d think he didn’t know about the rationing. The little man is smoking as though there’s no tomorrow.

He, though, just lies back on his bed and looks up at the ceiling, with its faint repeat of embossed diamonds and flowers, and conserves his energies and his cigarettes. He counts the dead flies in the frosted-glass lampshade.

“Do you know where she’ll have gone, Suzanne?” he asks, after a while.

The man shifts a little on the bed. “Someone will contact us.”

She could be holed up in a basement, or in someone’s maid’s room, or be staring at the ceiling in a different hotel. She could be miles across town or she could be just a street or two away. Anxiety tugs out the knots and snags and smoothes over the roughnesses; it leaves things simple, easy, clean. Right now, even if she’s fuming at him, at this moment he would call it love.

“Printer by trade,” the man says. “I was. Before all of this.”

He lifts his head a little; chin compressed, he looks down the length of the bed at him. “Were you now?”

“Posters, mainly. Handbills,” he says. “Circuses and fire-sales, concerts and lectures, all that kind of thing.” He lifts a hand, shows it. The fingertips are grimed and grey, the nails stained. “Mark of Cain,” the fellow says. “You can always tell a printer by his hands. Printers’ ink. Does not wash off. A trade will do that to you: it’ll mark you some way.”

“Good work, was it?”

“It wasn’t bad. Before the war.” He raises his shoulders. “Now it’s shit. It’s money and it’s a job and that’s not to be discounted. And it helps in one way because all the time I’m printing their devilry I look like I’m on their side. It’s cover. And maybe I do this in part because I must also do that. To redress the balance.”

The monkey-clawed rabbis; the kind Nazi soldiers with children on their shoulders.

“I had a copy of Mein Kampf,” he says, by way of consolation.

The other fellow nods, understanding.

“So what — we just wait?”

“Madame downstairs — she’ll get word back that we’ve arrived.”

“Oh.” He reconsiders the girl, the woman; remembers pale skin, fragile bird-bones.

“Someone will come.”

“Someone?”

Then his friend turns away and lights up another cigarette.

He lies back, hand behind his head. The bed, sunken and narrow, is nonetheless a marvel. He lifts a hand and looks at it. There’s a dent in the side of his middle finger where his pen rests, and his fingertips are slightly bent and flattened from thumping on his typewriter keys. That’s what a trade will do.

—

The day lengthens. It stretches and spools. He drifts in and out of sleep. There are daytime sounds from the street below — both French and German voices — and he is gone and back again, and there’s the chime of a municipal clock, and he counts the chimes and hopes that he missed a couple of the strikes in his sleep, since otherwise it’s only ten in the morning, even though an age has passed already in this room.

The light sharpens and the shadows deepen; sun slices through the shutters and streaks the curtains. The man mutters under his breath and from time to time utters something out loud. The sound jerks him out of sleep, but he fails to catch the sense and he drifts again.

Later, he wakes, and props himself up on his elbows. The man is still there, hunched on the end of the other bed. Another cigarette has burned itself to ashes between his inky fingers.

He blinks at his watch, wipes his lips; they’re tacky with spit.

“They should have come by now,” the man says.

He raises the watch to his ear, listens to its tick, then winds it.

“They should have sent word by now, at least,” the man insists.

He sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed. He rubs his forehead. “Did you sleep?”

“No.”

“Maybe they did send word. Shall I go and ask?”

“She’d have come and told us. It’s the network. They’re blown, I reckon.”

“No.”

“Or they’d be here. That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Maybe someone’s bike’s been stolen, or they’ve got a flat tyre. Or they’ve got lost. They’ve forgotten the address.”

Out in the street, distant at first — rounding the corner and the noise increasing — the sound of diesel engines: two, three. The man stiffens; his eyes widen.

“It’s them.”

“No—”

“It’s the Geste.”

“No.”

“I’m telling you. German car — two trucks. It’s the Gestapo.”

He pushes up from the bed, springs jangling. And then just stands there. The noise gets louder, the vehicles approaching — and then passing, and rounding the corner, and gone. A breath released. The man crosses to the window, edges back the curtain. They peer down together through the closed shutters; their faces are raked across with stripes of sunlight. In the street below, there is quiet, not even a pigeon strutting. The passing-by has swept the place quite clear.

“Do you know what they do if they get hold of you?” the man asks.

He tilts his head. He has heard stories.

The man nods slowly at something going on inside his head. He says, “When she was expecting our first, my wife wasn’t at all afraid. Our first child, I mean.”

“Oh.”

“She thought she could just, you know, stand it. That she would be brave and strong and that it would be all right. Second time, though, she was terrified. See, the thing is, you can’t imagine pain. You can’t foresee it. You think you can still be yourself, endure it and go on, but you can’t. Pain makes an animal out of everyone.”

“You should sleep.”

The man just looks at him. His eyes are red.

“Really. It’d do you good.” He sinks down on his bed again and peels off his socks. They are stiff and stinking. He bundles them up and stuffs them into his trouser pocket. “Lie down, at least,” he says. “We just have to wait it out.”

A long look, and then, “I don’t know how you can stand it.”

“It’s better than the tree.”

His friend blinks acquiescence. He leans closer to the window. Peers out again.

—

The hall is dim and stuffy and smells of old polish. It’s wearing on the nerves, of course it is, being stuck together like this. He leaves the other fellow to himself for a while.

He finds the little room with its high cistern and dangling chain. Outside a fire-escape switchbacks down into the courtyard, past guano-streaked brick walls and a blanket-stitch of pipes. He runs a bowl of water, soaks his socks and rubs them with a slip of hard green soap. Sounds rise up from the yard below, bouncing and echoing in the shaft — women’s voices. The neighbourhood chars are lost in recollection. It’s almost pornographic. One lusts for vanilla sugar, for a coffee Liégeois, for, oh my God, warm June strawberries and cream; another craves savoury foodstuffs; the seashell salt of pistaches, slippery fresh oysters, a briny crumb of Roquefort.

He leaves his socks marinating in the cloudy water. He unbuttons and sinks down on the lavatory seat.

The problem is, of course, not just the fear; it’s also the being dragged out of normality. Sleep, yes, and space, and clean clothes, and food — all these things are reassuring because they suggest that everything is as it should be. He hopes the fellow’s sleeping by now. He’ll spin it out a bit, his absence. He’ll wash, and then he’ll go downstairs and ask if there is anything to be had. A fried kidney; a gorgonzola sandwich. Where would the old man have gone anyway after the Wake, where was there left to go — the last book that Paul Léon had wanted, was there ever any chance of that? — but to the grave, God help him, and ill for so long too, permanently unwell, if only fifty-eight.

He tugs a square of old newspaper from the copper wire and wipes, and stands and pulls up his breeches, flushes, buttons, dips his hands in the soapy water with the socks, and rubs and twists and rinses them and wrings them again and shakes them. He drapes them over a pipe while he strips to the waist, runs fresh water, douses his face, puffing at the cold. He rubs round the back of his neck and under his arms, and dries his prickling flesh with the crusted loop of hand-towel. The socks gather up what’s left of their wetness and drip it on to the tiles. He squeezes them out again into the basin.

He is crossing the landing, barefoot, socks in one hand, boots in the other, when he hears the voices welling up from the lobby. Both are speaking French; one accent is German.

Bare bony feet finned out on the worn matting, he stands stock-still.

There are some rooms occupied, she is saying. There always are. She has a lot of businessmen here, up from the provinces. She always has had. They are busy men; they come and go. Sometimes they leave their keys, sometimes they forget. Men can be so careless; they have other things on their minds.

“And there has been nothing of late that seems at all suspicious?”

“Things are as they always have been.”

“Of course. Because if there had been anything out of order, you would already have reported it.”

A silence. It can only be supposed that she nods.

“I shall need to see the register.”

Upstairs, on the landing, he takes a step, breath held, towards their room. He thinks: fire-escape, courtyard, away along the back alley and put distance between themselves and the hotel. Where next, he doesn’t know. His friend will have some idea.

He eases the bedroom door open.

And the light is brilliant; it dazzles him; it makes no sense. The curtains billow, and there’s fresh air on his face, and the window is open, and the shutters wide, and it makes no sense at all. And his friend stands there, framed in the wide-open window, his back to the room; he is silhouetted against the autumn sky.

“Hello there—” he calls, but he doesn’t have a name to call him. “Hey, my friend—”

He sees the blank panes of the building opposite reflecting the sky, the potted red geraniums on a balcony, a pigeon shuffling itself along a balustrade. He sees his friend put a foot on to the little wrought-iron railing, and step up, and spread his arms wide across the light. He sees his friend dive out into the empty air.

The pigeon flaps away. He sees the scarlet blotches of geraniums, the gunmetal windows, the drenching white light.

Then there’s a crunch like a sack of coal fallen from the coal wagon. And then somebody screams.

And then there are other voices. Yelling.

Two strides to the window and he peers down. His friend lies like a comma on the pavement. A woman stands, her hand to her mouth, frozen. Others run towards the body, but then they stop short. A circle forms. Nobody goes closer, nobody hunkers in to check for breath. Nobody will touch him.

People look up though, to the window, so he steps away, out of sight.

He stuffs his wet socks into his pocket and snatches up his boots. He grabs his bag, his jacket, his coat and muffler. He is out of the room and racing down the corridor. In the WC, he tugs up the window and folds himself out through the narrow gap. The fire-escape creaks; the air is sour with rubbish; the metal gantry sways queasily underneath him. He clambers down barefoot to the dustbins and the scratting pigeons and an empty yard, the cleaning women and their voices gone.

He treads into his boots there, on the dirty stones. A dimpled window just beside him gives on to the lobby; he can see movement inside, scattered smears of grey uniform and flesh-pink. In German-accented French: Check all the rooms. Question everyone.

The sounds of hammering footfalls and doors flung open.

And then, softly and nearby, just beyond the grubby, distorting window, the woman begins to sob.

He walks out of the yard and down the alleyway, to where it opens into the avenue, a block down from the front of the hotel.

A glance thrown back as he steps out of the alleyway. His friend lies curled on his side on the road as if he has laid himself down there, finally, to sleep. A Gendarme stands over the body, but people steer around it anyway; they keep their distance, afraid of contamination. Blood pools between the cobblestones.

He turns away. He sets one foot in front of the other.

There’s a touch on his arm. A young lad — pimples, faint moustache, the contact they had been waiting for — who jerks his head down the avenue and says, “Shall we go?”

He makes himself walk. His legs are puppet’s legs. His arms are wood.

He squints into the low sun. Distance gathers behind him. The unknown boy walks at his side.

His boots chafe; his feet hurt.

This is good. The discomfort of the flesh. Its scourging. Its continuance.

—

There is a bed. There are four walls. There is a window. There is a little china vase on the washstand and it has dried cornflowers in it. Tomorrow there is a train south: they will try to make it across into the Zone Libre.

They are together. By a conspiracy of kindness, they are returned to each other and given an hotel room for the night. They have a towel, soap, water in the jug. He can get up and sit down and stretch out, and there is daylight sliced by the shutters.

She is not angry with him, after all. Why would she be angry? He is not to be blamed for what has happened. Rather, to be consoled.

Suzanne turns away to unbutton her blouse; she fumbles at her stockings underneath her skirt. Her hipbones show even through her slip.

He gets up and goes to the washstand. He scrubs his nails, he takes off his collar and unbuttons his shirt and scrubs his neck and under his arms. He gives her time.

And then they lie, half-dressed, unspeaking, smoking, and they do not know quite how to be together; they don’t know what is allowed and what is wanted any more. A touch elicits a shiver. An innocuous word will give offence. How did they used to do this, simply get along?

But now she lies sleeping in her slip beside him, the sheet twisted, the mattress dented under their slight weight. His thoughts drift and skip like falling leaves, and he follows them down towards the harbour water and is sinking through it.

Then blinks awake. “Oh. Hell.”

She surfaces. “What?”

“Oh God.”

“What?”

“The register.”

“What?” She’s up on an elbow, staring at him.

“When I signed the register. I think I used my real name.”

She looks at him. “ ‘Think?’ ”

“I know I did.”

She closes her eyes. She breathes. Then her eyes open again and she swings her legs off the edge of the bed and scrambles for her clothes.

“I’ll pack. You shave.”

“What?”

“I’m not going anywhere with you looking like that.”

He touches his moustache. “It’s a disguise.”

“Brothel of shit is it a disguise. It makes you look like a British officer.”

She starts tugging at her stockings, then stops herself and rolls them slowly on, because even right now at this moment stockings are far too precious to risk.

“We’ll have to find something else,” she says, furious. She tucks her blouse into her skirt.

“I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she says. “It doesn’t help.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN EN ROUTE, September 1942

It seems as though they are making good progress for a while — the countryside is spinning past, it’s a brilliant blue autumn day; beyond the window there’s a blur of saplings, brambles, browning fern. She stares out of the window; she sleeps. She isn’t really talking to him yet.

The last time they’d run, they’d run like horses run, or sheep; they’d run because they were spooked, because everyone else was running. They had run to his friends. First Shem in Vichy, then Mary and Marcel in Arcachon; there had been wine and sea-bathing, sunshine, and a fear that seems, looking back on it, so painfully innocent. Nobody had been killed; nobody had been arrested then. Not one of them was in immediate danger. They were on nobody’s list. It seems strange now that they had thought it worth their while to run at all. Because now they are alone and racing through vast darkness, and with only a tiny patch of light to aim for, and that distant and uncertain.

The train slows; it creeps past wooded banks and gravel, past warehouses and stalled goods wagons and sidings and factories and the smoke rising from high chimneys into a wide blue sky. They are inching south.

Crawling towards the shred of light they have been offered. An isolated little town, where the roads are so bad and the buildings so cramped and ramshackle that nobody bothers with it much at all. Roussillon. Her friends, the Lobs, are scraping by all right there, unmolested, even though he is Jewish. But it’s a long way off, and there’s still the border to get over, and every mile they travel seems to take longer than the mile before.

And then the train slides aside from the main track and stops, between the workshops and warehouses and the smallholdings trailing with dead beanstalks and the still-green creep of pumpkin plants.

Time ticks. The light fades. The air is full of cigarette smoke and body smells. Nothing happens.

A woman sits with a basket on her knee; her two boys had wriggled and complained and played mon p’tit doigt me dit for a while, but are now slumped against her, caps askew, asleep. It’s not them snoring, though: that’s someone else. And further down the carriage a woman just keeps on talking — a thick sound to her voice, as though her throat is clotted. A long low spool of talk, winding on and on and on. On and on and on.

On the main line a train goes thundering by; a stream of green and yellow. And then it’s gone.

Theirs doesn’t move. The shadows deepen. That woman, he notices, is talking about her hens. How her son used to look after them, how they were his pride and joy, how they were marl and blue and red.

He looks at his watch. Raises it to his ear. Looks at it again. He winds it, his eyes following a flight of starlings as it dips and weaves across the orange sky.

And they had a red rooster who could stare down the Pope, eyes like elderberries, peck at your ankles when you went in to fetch the eggs. But with her son, never gave him any trouble at all. Adored him, did that rooster.

The sun slides beyond the buildings, melon-pink. Suzanne’s head sinks on to his shoulder. His cheek rests on her hair. He blinks. This might be the beginnings of forgiveness.

“Do you remember,” she murmurs, “in Cahors? All that rain.”

He nods, his cheek ruffling her hair, the stubble snagging.

The electric lights do not come on. The woman talks about her orchard, how the boy would scramble up to pick the apples, and she would have scolded him, but what was the point? He would just have gone scrumping elsewhere and got into worse trouble for it.

He blinks slow blinks.

Then a train door slams. And there are voices. New voices.

Suzanne jerks awake. He touches her hand. They listen.

Compartment doors slide open; brisk requests, replies; doors slide shut. Papers are being checked — and the woman continues, buzzing like radio static, while they strain to hear over her. His hands grip, his jaw tightens, but it will be fine, of course it will be fine: their papers are good. They have been told that they are good. So much trouble has been taken, so many risks have been run on their behalf.

The voices are closer now. Individual interactions: the demand, the moment’s pause with fumbling, the proffering of papers; a silent scrutiny, then questions. To what purpose are you travelling? Where have you come from? What is your ultimate destination? Whom exactly are you intending to meet? But their papers are good. They are supposed to be good. The papers will stand up to scrutiny. Won’t they?

“We have to—”

She nods. She’s on her feet, hefting her bag.

They thread their way out of the compartment and along the corridor. They pass the woman. Back of a grey head, a maroon felt hat. She is talking about a bicycle now: her son worked for months washing pots in the café in town to save up for it; he would go out riding in the country lanes, his head skimming along higher than the hedges.

He glances back and sees the woman’s mouth moving, the tears streaming down her cheeks; a bubble swells at her nostril. He had not known, had not realized that the thickness of her voice was tears. It pushes after him, even as they heave the train door open and dip down for a toehold. The boy had had a puncture, too bad to mend there on the spot, had to push his bike back to the garage. Back after dark, and worried sick, she was.

He drops down on to the gravel, drags his bag after him. Suzanne reaches out a hand and he helps her down. There’s a smell of oil and dust and urine. He pushes the door to after them.

“Someone might say.”

“Yes.”

He jerks his head: come on. They dash across the tracks, then scramble up the bank and in amongst the trees. Brambles tear at clothes and skin. He blunders through a clump of nettles. He swears under his breath, carries on.

They reach the top of the bank breathless. The air is cool; it’s twilight. There’s a fence — he, long-legged, swings across, and helps her clamber up and over and down the other side. A lone horse ambles across, snuffing at them.

The field is bare and scrubby and exposed. They turn and scud along the field edge, keeping to the shadow of the trees; the horse trots alongside them. There’s a gate but it is tied shut and the knot doesn’t give so they climb the bars, and then they’re in a lane, the horse left behind. The lane is hedged at first, and then there are fences and then buildings and the way narrows between high walls; there’s a smell of tar and the sound of their clattering footfalls and their rasping breath. Something stops and stares, its eyes reflecting red; then a blink and it’s gone. Their hands, linked tight, are hot and damp together; they can only go single-file now between brick walls, he doesn’t know when they joined hands. His arm is stretched back to her; she’s tumbling forward to hold on to him. It’s uncomfortable, constraining, it might be better to let go. They don’t let go. His chest hurts; the scar pulls and he can’t catch his breath.

At an intersection between alleyways they stop in unspoken accord; she bends double, gasping, a hand to her side. He leans against a damp wall, his belly heaving. There’s a little light left. It’s grainy and crumbling.

“Are you all right?”

She says, “I’m all right.” Then, after a moment, “What about you?”

He nods. He’ll live. Though his eyes swim with stars.

“Does your chest hurt?”

“Does it hurt?” He laughs, but the laugh collapses into a coughing fit. When he can speak again, he just says, “Yes.”

He fishes out his cigarettes, lights up, takes a drag, then turns the cigarette around and proffers it. She takes it off him, smokes. Perhaps she has forgiven him.

“What will we do now?” she asks.

“Keep on. Make that rendezvous.”

“On foot.”

“Well, yes.”

“Oh, the cow.”

“You don’t want to walk?”

“I’m fatigued, you know I am. You are too. We were tired before we started this.”

“You could have stayed on the train if you wanted to. You should have said.”

She narrows her eyes at him. She takes another drag on the cigarette. Then: “So which way is it, genius?”

He looks up at the thin strip of sky overhead; it’s a deep evening blue.

“We could tell by the sun,” he says. “On the train, it was going down on the right.”

“But that was on the train.”

“Yes.”

“And now we’re in an alleyway.”

“Yes,” he says.

“And we can’t see the sun. And we’re all turned around. So.”

“What then, toss a coin?” He fumbles in a pocket.

“What good would that do?”

He shrugs, takes the cigarette off her. “It’d be something. It’d be a start.”

“Hardly.”

“So we’ll just stay here, then.” He takes a drag and settles down against the wall.

“Shut up,” she says. “Idiot. You break my feet, you know.”

He shuffles his shoulders, chilly brick against his back. “You know, I like this alleyway. I think we could be happy here.”

“Oh, I’ve had enough. Come on!” She grabs his arm.

He heaves himself off the wall and stumbles after her, his breath sore in his chest: cross-country runs, bare corn-beef legs, the rawness of autumn in Enniskillen.

They emerge into an open space, a woodyard, smelling of sawn timber. A crow flaps overhead and makes them jump. They cross the yard and slip past a boom-barrier on to a wider gravel track, past a parked wagon and a strip of wasteland, past factory gates, and then on to a metalled road; this is becoming the outskirts of the town. He walks beside her then, his breath easing. Softening to her, he catches her hand. He doesn’t glance round at her, but even so he knows that she has pulled a face.

—

The woman lies on the cobbles, her head resting on a curved arm. Her coat is open on a thin blouse and her skirt riding up to expose her stocking-tops. Suzanne crouches to twitch the fabric down. She gets back up and her cheeks are flushed. She slips her arm under his and clings close. Her breath comes in misty billows.

“Her eyes are frozen,” she whispers.

“What?”

“The wet of her eyes is frozen.”

A man is lying flat on his back. They pass him, their footfalls echoing in the evening square. A cat slinks away at their approach. They can see the dark wound in the man’s cheek: a hole where there should be skin and muscle. The side teeth are bared in a snarl, a bit of bone glows white and the tongue slumps heavily sideways, hanging out. It’s all just there, just open to the world: the quiet internal spaces.

Outside the Mairie, the police are at work. They are rifling pockets, making notes on clipboards; they are lining up the bodies and laying them in the back of a truck. Soon everything — everybody — will be processed and cleared away; it will be as though nothing ever happened here.

He doesn’t want to look. He has to look. This has to be looked at, square in the face, right in the hole in the face — the policemen with their breath fogging the evening, the corpses with the air clear and unclouded above them. Words fail him now; they keep on failing; he is as speechless as a corpse himself.

He squeezes Suzanne’s arm tight into his side; her chin is crumpled and her gaze fixed. Dry-eyed, they slip into the bus station; it is cold and it is busy. They find a bench. His skin feels oily with disgust. “Excuse me.” He leaves her sitting there and strides off to the gentlemen’s lavatory. There, hunched over a filthy toilet à la turque, he heaves up nothing, then some bitter yellow bile. He is left shaking. He feels no better for it.

He goes back to Suzanne, tilts his head at her enquiring look. He is fine. Girls, women, men in working blues gather at the stands. They stand stiff and shivering, coats buttoned up, collars turned, with their baskets, cases, packages; the buses swing in and doors are clanked open, and the people shuffle themselves on board and the buses heave away. Two German soldiers cross the forecourt and leave a wake of silence. There is something vulnerable about their exposed ears, their shaven napes. They take up a position near the rear wall. It makes the back of the neck burn, the desire to look round, the necessity of not doing so.

“How long until the bus comes?”

He checks his watch, turns his wrist to show its face to her. She nods, sits stiffly, hands folded in her lap. He remains silent. He rubs at the back of his neck; it’s prickling.

“Who will bury them?”

She speaks low and without turning towards him. He looks round at her, the better to make out what was said. She is grey under the eyes.

“I mean, who will pay for it?” she adds.

“Suzanne—”

“Will they do it? Will the administration pay for the funerals?”

“Suzanne, please.”

“Or the police? Is it their job to organize the…the disposal? I mean, they don’t actually do anything to stop people being killed, so they must at least deal with the results.”

“Suzanne—”

A bus pulls in at a nearby stand; the engine idles, phlegmy. People file on-board. Some of the passengers are looking at them.

“Or the town hall? The municipality? Is it their responsibility now?”

He slides an arm around her. He pulls her tight, hard; she lets herself be drawn in against him, but just stares down at her worn-soft shoes and shakes her head, and talks almost to herself.

“Or will the families have to? Because—” A blot falls on to her lap, and then another. She sniffs. “Yesterday all those people—”

He rubs her arm. He whispers, “Whisht.”

Her head hangs; she skims her eyes with the flank of her hand. She blows out a long breath. She is trying. She is really trying to stop. And one mood can set aside another. Irritation helps.

“I don’t know how you stay so calm,” she says.

Another bus pulls in, rattles near them. Diesel fumes and tobacco smoke.

“I’m not calm.”

Pink-eyed, she glares at him. “Well, you seem it. Calm and quiet.”

Maybe one day there will be words. Maybe silence will be all that there ever is.

“I can’t think about it now. I can’t do it justice.”

After a moment, she asks, “Aren’t you scared?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t look scared.”

“I’m terrified.”

Her lips are pressed tight; her eyes are wide and sore-looking. “You’re impossible.”

A bus pulls in at their stand. The door heaves open. He gets to his feet and offers her a hand.

“Come on,” he says. “That’s us.”

—

Later, much later on, they are shown into an afterlife of broken chairs and crates, of empty bottles worn misty at the shoulders. The patron goes back into the little locked-tight café and sets about chinking glasses and softly singing. A few bentwood chairs have been drawn round an upended barrel, where there’s an ashtray and a candle burning in a bottle. That’s all the light there is. Even the air feels crowded, the smells of smoke and stale wine and old coffee jostling together. She sinks on to one of the chairs; he folds himself down on to another. After a moment, he picks a cigarette end out of the ashtray, examines it, then puts it back.

He gets up again to help Suzanne off with her bag, and she manages to lift an arm, to tilt her head out of his way. He sinks down on to the little creaking chair and takes the weight off his aching feet again. It is an act of will not to bend down and start taking off his boots.

The patron comes through with three tumblers of red wine, rims pinched together in his fingertips, which leaves his other hand free to carry a plate of charcuterie. He sets all this down on the barrel-top. And now they’re bolt alert. They glance at each other, then at the patron as he ambles across to the stacked crates in a corner. Then they stare at the plate.

The patron shifts boxes, chairs; there is air-dried ham and blood-sausage and an unspoken exchange between them — Should we…? Could we just…? — then there’s a creak. Behind them a door opens and there’s a gust of cellar air. Then he sees, and her name is on his lips — Jeannine—Gloria. Her face is shadowed, lined: she is ten years older than when he saw her last, just months ago. They clasp hands.

“Good evening,” he says.

She kisses him. He feels the scratch of his unshaven skin against her cheek. “Irishman.”

She dips down to kiss Suzanne too.

“My God,” Suzanne says.

He speaks lightly. “Who else have you got tucked away in there?”

The patron shrugs, pleased; he rolls a cigarette with yellowed fingertips.

Jeannine sinks down on a chair; she reaches for a slice of blood-sausage. She is thin and tired, but then everybody is thin and tired. There is something different about her now. A hardness to her that was not there before the cell was blown. The lines of her face are grim.

The ham is cool and leathery and salt. It falls into flakes on the tongue; it is so good he doesn’t want to swallow it because then it will be over. Questions suggest themselves but are dismissed; he does not know how to begin.

Suzanne manages though, simple, warm, a way that he must learn. “How are you? How has it been for you, all of this?”

Jeannine juts her chin, unforthcoming, noncommittal.

“And your family?” he tries.

“Safe. For now.”

“What happened?” he asks, and then rephrases the words almost as soon as they are spoken. “Do you know what happened?”

She reaches for a second slip of blood-sausage, folds it; it crumbles along the crease. The patron lights his cigarette. There’s the tiny crumbling of tobacco-and-paper as it burns.

“We were betrayed.”

“By whom? Do you know?”

“A priest.”

“There was a priest?” Suzanne asks.

“In another part of the network. He came to us, said he wanted to help. We took him at his word, and we were wrong. We lost so many good people because of him.”

“But a priest?”

Jeanine tilts her head. “They’re just men.” She speaks round her mouthful. “But maybe he wasn’t even that. He’d come along with the Geste when our people were arrested. He came to watch. He liked it.”

“Name of God,” says Suzanne.

He sits back, says in English, “Fuck.”

“We were foolish,” says Jeannine. Her face is a white mask in the candlelight. “Recruiting friends, and friends of friends.” She looks at him directly for the first time with those sloe-dark Italian eyes. “Do you not think, Irishman, that that was wrong?”

He thinks, rather, of a priest. A fleshy smile, a black soutane and an incongruous whiff of cigars. Passed on the landing or the stairs, in Alfy’s building. And exactly where would a priest be getting hold of cigars, times being what they are? Cigarettes are hard enough to come by. “It was not you who betrayed us.”

“Forgive me, please,” she says. “I don’t yet have a full account of who is still at liberty and who is not. I was uncertain of your situation until Monsieur here told me he expected a Frenchwoman and an Irishman, travelling together, to pass over the border. Once in the Free Zone you have somewhere to go?” She holds up a hand. “No details, please.”

“Friends of Suzanne’s,” he says.

Suzanne says, “Where they are, they say it’s a decent place to be.”

“Good. Good.”

“And you?”

“One picks up what threads one can, and one carries on. Which reminds me. I have something for you.”

She lifts a package out of her bag, a manila envelope with a rectangular block wrapped inside it. The edges are softened with wear. She unfolds the package. She takes out a stack of banknotes. Without counting, she divides the stack, slips two-thirds of it back into the envelope. She holds the remainder towards them. They look at the money. Nobody says anything.

“Go on,” Jeannine says.

“It’s very kind of you,” he says. “But no.”

“What?” Suzanne says.

“I insist.” Jeannine says.

“Others will need it more.”

“Have you gone quite mad?” Suzanne asks. “Have you not noticed how things are for us?”

He doesn’t look at her.

“That priest screwed us for thousands,” Jeannine is saying. “This is an apple and an egg in comparison. Take it, please. I’d give you more if I could, but I need to keep some in reserve, for the others.”

The patron says, “I can give it a good home.”

“Here.” Suzanne reaches for it. “Thank you.”

Jeannine passes the cash to Suzanne, who fumbles it into her bag. He looks away, uncomfortable.

“Thank you very much,” Suzanne says.

“Well.” The patron draws up a chair, drops his tobacco pouch beside the plate. He nods at it. “Go ahead, help yourself. Roll up a couple to take with you. We’d better get our plans in place.”

—

Their footfalls clip along the empty street.

“She was offering us the money; she wanted us to have the money; we need the money and yet you refused to take it.”

“Softly, please.”

She tugs at his elbow. “You know how things are for us. You must have noticed. This is not easy. This is not — good.”

“It had not escaped me.”

“What is it? Why can’t you let yourself be helped? Why do other people deserve your help and you won’t let them give you anything?”

He blows out a long breath. He says, “What do you think happened to him?”

She stops dead in the road. “What?” But he continues on with that long lope of his, and she has to break into a trot to catch back up with him. “Who?”

“The boy.”

“What boy?”

“The boy on the train,” he says.

“Those little fellows with their mum? I don’t see why anything—”

“No, no. The woman on the train, the talking woman — the one who just kept talking. She was talking about him. About the boy. Her son.”

He has stopped in his tracks now. She has to turn back to him. He is just a grainy shape, unreadable. “Oh,” she says. “Her.”

“D’you think he’s dead?”

Her own heartbeat is a thick throb, making the darkness pulse. “I don’t know.”

She steps up to him and pulls him close, and holds him a long moment. Bones and flesh and long-worn threadbare clothes, the smell of unwashed bodies and the cold of the night on their skin, and the gritty tiredness of not being young any more, and the brief warmth held between them. Then he pulls away. And they walk on.

—

“Are you certain?”

He glances at his watch. He lifts it to his ear. He listens to the tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. He winds it anyway, glancing around. The sun is setting again; the sky is flushed with orange over there, in what must be the west. And it’s getting cold.

“It looks more like, I don’t know, a shrub.”

“It’s a tree. It’s a willow. He said a tree, a willow.”

“It’s half-dead.”

“Yes. It is. It’s a half-dead willow.”

There’s a wide verge, which rises to become a bank, and at the top of the bank a fence runs; the tree forms part of this fence, like a post that’s taken root and grown. Bleached roots claw down into the earth; above, the trunk is slender, and two slim boughs stretch up to form a Y. A few blunt twigs, a handful of leaves. It is by no means impressive, but it is distinctive. It is the kind of tree of which to make a landmark. Of which one might readily say, You can’t miss it.

“It’s quite small,” she says, still doubtful.

“It’s discreet.”

“But how can you be certain it’s a willow?”

“He said that it would be. The patron. He said to wait by the willow tree and that fellow would meet us and bring us along.”

“But that doesn’t mean that this is it.”

“Well, no, I suppose not.”

With tired sore steps, she clambers up the bank and goes right up to the tree. She peers up it towards the branches and then down at the roots. She gives the trunk a little kick. The whole thing shakes, and one of its few last leaves falls off and skips down to the ground.

“Well,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t know about any of this. I don’t know what we’re doing here at all.”

He sinks down on the verge. He begins to take off his boots. “There’s a name for them in English, for that kind of willow.”

She watches him as he strips his laces. “If you get them off,” she says, “do you think you’ll ever get them back on again?”

“What is it now? I can’t remember.”

“Your feet will swell up,” she says, “like pumpkins.”

“ ‘Goat willow!’ ” He heaves off a boot. “I don’t know if it’s the same in French—saule de chèvre?”

She sits down beside him, stretching out her thin bare legs. He eases off the other boot and then peels away his socks.

“I never heard that before,” she says.

There is a bramble scratch traced across her left shin. Her stockings are long gone. She wears a pair of folded-down old tennis socks now. The effect is schoolgirlish. He plants his bare feet in the grass away from her. He spreads his gnarly, blistered toes. That one nailless stump with its knuckle missing. Bits cut off and bits falling off and out of him, the shambles that he is.

“Isn’t it cold?”

He shrugs. After a minute he says, “My father used to know the names of all the plants and trees.”

He leans back on his hands. The last of the evening sun is warm on his face; the ground is cold beneath him. Starlings gather noisily in the branches of a nearby copse.

“It will be all right when we get to Roussillon,” she says.

The starlings lift. He watches as they turn in a shoal across the sky.

“We’ll get by all right there,” she says. “We’ll get work; you can get your allowance sent. The Lobs have had no trouble there at all.”

“I know. You said. That’s good.”

“We’ll be comfortable in Roussillon.”

“Yes.”

“We can wait out the whole thing there.”

He nods. If it can be waited out. If waiting is a thing that can be done for sufficiently long, if circumstances permit it. Then: “What do you think it’s called, this place?”

“This place?”

She glances round at the sweeping fields, the verge, the dried stems and seed-pods of last summer’s flowers. “This isn’t really a place. Why would it be called anything?”

“In Ireland every hole in the hedge has a name.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A name and a story to go with it as to how it got its name. A story that’ll go on as long as anyone will hear it.”

“Well, that wouldn’t work in France. France is far too big for that. We’d get into a real muddle if we behaved like that round here.”

Ireland is sticky, ink-stained, grubby in the creases. France is clean and freshly washed and soaped.

“You should put your boots back on,” she says.

“They’re crucifying me.”

“What if someone comes?”

“I’ll put them on then.”

“I don’t mean him. I mean, someone else.”

“Who else?”

“I don’t know. Police. Border patrols. The Geste.”

“Place like this, we’d hear them coming a mile off.”

He grinds his heels into the cold earth, the grass between his toes. She watches, envious. Then she sighs, and then she bends forward and tugs her own laces loose. She toes off her shoes, one and then the other.

“This man, this contact,” she says, tugging off her socks. Her feet are patched with red, and blisters have formed, and popped, and been worn clean away again, leaving the skin raw.

“Yes.”

“How will we know that it’s him?”

“Who else could it be?”

“But that’s the problem! That’s what I’m saying. It could be anyone. We’ll be sitting here waiting, and we’ll watch someone coming down the road and before you know it they’re here, and then maybe it turns out they’re not the contact, they’re the Gestapo.”

“Gestapo travel in packs, like — I don’t know, hyenas. They don’t ever go anywhere alone. He’ll be alone; just him himself.”

She nods at this, looking across the road towards the wide-open fields, the bare trees, the fading sky.

“I don’t like it here,” she says.

“It’s only for a little while.”

“Just being here looks suspicious. There’s nowhere to hide; nowhere to blend in.”

“That’s true. But we can’t just go. If we go we miss our contact and we don’t have any help at all.”

She rummages in her bag, pulls out a crumpled package, unfurls the paper wrapping. Two biscuits.

“That’s all that’s left?”

She nods.

He takes one. “Thank you.”

She leans in against him, clutching her own biscuit. He puts his arm around her. She shuffles closer. Elbows, shoulder-blades.

“I don’t like it,” she says. “Not one little bit.”

“You don’t have to like it. You just have to get through it.”

He feels the movement of her arm under his hand, and then her jaw against his chest as she bites and chews her biscuit. His turns to powder in his mouth, and then to glue. He swallows, and then takes another bite.

“I’m tired,” she says stickily.

“Then go to sleep.”

“What if he comes?”

“He won’t.”

“Don’t be facetious.”

“If he comes, I’ll wake you. If I’m asleep too, he’ll wake us. You won’t miss out on anything, I promise you, by sleeping, so have a sleep. But put your socks back on first though, or you’ll get chilblains.”

“I’m thirsty.”

“We’ve nothing to drink. Do you want a sucking stone?”

“No.”

Suzanne shuffles around, wraps her coat around her and curls on to her side. Above the open fields, the starlings wheel and turn and cry. For a moment, they settle in the trees, and then by some unfathomable assent they lift shrieking into the air again. He sings, softly, in German:

Nun merk’ ich erst, wie müd’ ich bin

Da ich zur Ruh’ mich lege

She shuffles irritably. “Huh?”

“Schubert,” he says. “Rast.”

“Oh, yes,” she says. “Shut up.”

The song sings on in his head. After a while her breathing changes. He unbuckles his bag and drags out his spare sweater. He drapes it over her. The moon rises. He considers it. Closes his eyes and summons up an image: Caspar Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon. The slumped tree, bare of leaves, its furred roots exposed as it slowly sinks towards the earth. Massive rocks, parched grass; in the sky a white disc misty, radiant. The two figures, stick-supported, lean on each other. The ancient moon, the ancient rocks, the failing dying ancient tree. The men for just a moment paused to look, to see, as if to give all this meaningless nature meaning.

He finds, in his pocket, that little pebble from the beach at Greystones. He tucks it into his mouth and sucks on it, and the hard thing brings water there.

—

The cold wakes him. His eyes open on to blackness and he can’t make sense of it. Then he sees the stars. He feels the press of the earth against him, pushing at his heels, heaving up against his shoulder-blades. His fingers twine into the cold grass, his nails dig into the ground; he is clinging on at the spin of it, the stars hurtling past, the giddy distances, the sick rush of a fairground ride, sticking him flat-backed against this cold earth. Then it thuds right into him: time, the present moment, here. He sits up, drops the stone from his mouth into his palm and retches.

“Is that you?” she asks.

He spits, swallows. “Usually.”

She fumbles for him in the darkness; her hand is cold on cold skin, the wire and gristle of his arm. She sits up beside him.

“Is he here?” she asks. “Did he come?”

They sit, side by side, stiff, dew-damp and cold. The sky is faintly light now. The slight tree is silhouetted against the blue.

He says, “I don’t think he did.”

After a while, she asks, “What time is it?”

He lifts his wrist and peers, but can’t make out the hands. He lifts it to his ear and hears it ticking. She shuffles closer, hungry for warmth. He slips his sucking stone back into his pocket and plants a blind, awkward kiss — it lands on unwashed, dirty hair.

“What’ll we do?”

“We’ll go back to that hayrick, try to sleep through the day.”

He feels the movement as she nods.

“We’ll be all right there. No one will be needing any hay yet.”

She sniffs.

“And then Monsieur will surely come tomorrow.”

“It’s tomorrow now.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It can’t go on like this for ever,” he says.

“No. We’ll get to Roussillon,” she says.

After a moment, he says, “I think it’s getting lighter.”

She twists to see the paling sky behind her.

“We’ll pass that field again,” she says. “We can get some of those carrots. You liked the carrots.”

“They were better than the turnips.”

“In a little while.”

“Yes.”

“When there’s light enough to see by.”

“Yes.”

“We’ll go then.”

“Yes. Time enough till then.”

And then there’s a sound.

“Hush.”

Footfalls. Movement in the hedge shadows. Skin bristles.

“Is it you?” he calls out into the darkness. “Hello there! Is that you, Monsieur?”

The figure stands against the pre-dawn sky. He’s just a boy. His socks are crumpled down and his jacket is too big for him. He glances off along the lane. He says, “Come with me.”

CHAPTER TWELVE CROSSING, October 1942

Figures stumble out of the shaft of daylight and into darkness, blinded by the difference. The door falls shut behind them and they confer in unself-conscious voices, oblivious to the company.

“I can’t see a thing. Is that you, Sylvie?”

“It’s Agnès, Pascale. Here, take my hand.”

He clears his throat out of politeness. They freeze, fall silent, peer ineffectually around.

Then Suzanne says, “Good day.” And they soften at the sound of a woman’s voice, return the greeting uncertainly.

When he and Suzanne were led to the barn, it was barely morning; their eyes had less of an adjustment to make. The boy sloped off again before they could thank him. They saw the old fellow sleeping in the straw, who stirred and muttered but didn’t wake. Later, they were joined by two young men, who were anxious and taciturn and who huddled down in one of the milking stalls and talked only to each other; and then a middle-aged countrywoman, who took a seat on a hay bale, set her basket on her knee, leant back against the bare stone wall and promptly fell asleep. He wondered did the boy bring them, slipping away each time to find someone else before he could be glimpsed?

By now the two of them feel like old lags, and that it is the done thing to welcome newcomers and put them at their ease.

“All’s well,” Suzanne says, getting up and limping towards the young women. “Come in, get comfortable.”

They settle down on bundled fodder. Clothes rustling, coats unbuttoned, bags dropped. And shoelaces stripped; the easing-off of shoes. War, it turns out, is dreadfully hard on the feet.

“You’ll never get your shoes back on again, Pascale.”

“Good. They’re evil. I hate them. I’ll walk barefoot to Avignon if I have to.”

“You’d look well.”

“You say that now, but just wait until—”

The clump of leather hitting the floor, one and then another. A sigh, followed by a wincing exploration of sore places, blisters.

“Anyway, we’re stuck here for hours. We know that much. I’m not keeping them on all that blessed time.”

—

Time passes slowly in confinement. Low conversations, card games, the drifting in and out of sleep; sunlight from a missing slate shafts across the floor, and softens, and goes blue.

He must have been sleeping, because there’s a sweep of night air across his face and a slice of starlight that narrows, shrinks and disappears, and he shuffles up on to elbows. He blinks into the dark. Suzanne’s already up beside him, properly awake.

“Is it—?”

“Hush,” she says. “I’m listening.”

The darkness seems fuller, more crowded. There’s a whiff of tobacco smoke, and then he spots the red coal of a cigarette and hears the voices speaking low, in the rolling wet accent of the region.

A match flares and for a moment there’s a devil’s mask, heavy-browed and creased, and the light grows and is touched into a lantern, and it glows on other faces too. These are the passeurs. They are nameless. They belong to this place like the local stone.

The lantern draws them from the dark — the girls, one of them limping and barefoot; her friends supporting her, their faces white; the old man, hunched and peering, scratching his groin; the young men approaching too, though wary as rabbits. Suzanne gets up, and he struggles to his feet, and they make their way towards the lamp, lame with wear.

“That’s too many. I’d no idea there’d be so many,” one of the passeurs is saying.

Around the lantern there’s a general sucking of teeth.

“We can’t take them all at once, not across the fields.”

“The girls can go in the car.”

“You’re kidding.”

“In the boot.”

“All three of them?”

“It’s a big boot. We put the dogs in there all the time.”

“They’re not dogs, though, are they?”

“No, but it’s not like it’s the middle of summer. They’re not going to suffocate.”

“He has a point. It’s not far.”

The three girls stand, just in the glow of the light, in their knee-length skirts and broken shoes. The barefoot one lists slightly to one side. They have their jackets wrapped tight round them, arms folded across hollow bellies.

“Do you particularly object,” a passeur addresses them, “to crossing the border in the boot of this idiot’s stinking old Citroën?”

The three of them look at him, long and blank. They’re barely more than schoolgirls. The barefoot one says, “That would be good.” And then the others nod along with her.

Devil-face then turns to his companions. “Well. There we are, then.” Then back to the girls: “Better get your things together, my darlings. You’re with him.”

—

The passeurs are barely there; they are never more than parts, they exist as synecdoches: a glimmer of moonlight caught on an eye, the turn of a profile against starlight, a pale strip of neck above a dark coat collar. The talk too is scraps and shreds and it drifts away like ashes. He can’t put any of it — either what he sees or what he hears — together. He can’t make this cohere.

They have been split into smaller groups like sheep by sheepdogs. The girls have curled themselves obligingly into the boot of the car; another party is heading further west across open country. There are patrols and posts on the roads, so their bunch is to go through the fields and cross where the border is more notional than concrete. It is a relief to be told what to do for a while. Not to have to make decisons. It is the relief of a pressure change, a different unease.

They pause at the field gate; the passeur says something, but it is not quite catchable: a flash of teeth, then this, which he does catch: “Stay low, tread softly, keep quiet.”

Then the fellow slips into the darkness and they follow. The ground is rough. The passeur keeps slipping in and out of sight, as if he is a magic trick: now you see him, now you don’t. It makes the heart lurch and hammer, makes the senses strain. Then there’s movement, and there he is again, and the skin flushes and the nerves sing out. And underneath it all is the insistent throb of disquiet, of what do we know about any of this, after all? He could be taking us anywhere, he could melt away at any moment. He could lead us right to the Gestapo for the money and the pleasure of watching the arrest. If one man can do a thing like that, so could another. It has become, after all, something that people do.

He is thinking this as he shuffles along, bent almost double, creeping like a toad in the shadow of a hedge. Suzanne, ahead, is a low and silent shape; he can’t even hear her footsteps. There is a blond expanse of stubbled field to his left. When a foot strays off the worn-bare path, the cropped stems prod and spike his boot soles. It is a useful reminder of the straight and narrow.

At the corner of the field, they scramble through a gap in the hedge. Beyond, the world is different: the Indian corn still stirs uncut in the breeze, whispering and musty. The path continues on, a narrow pass between the stems.

“…silence absolute…,” the passeur is saying. “…close now…”

He is ushering them by; he brings up the rear, and it’s worse then, the sense of fumbling blindly into darkness, through the dry stalks, into who knows what.

Footfalls. The sound of boots on a metalled road. There’s torchlight broken into bits by the wicker-weave of the hedge. They hunker low, silent, breath heaving; and then the boots go crunching on, and the light is past and gone.

His heart hammers. His breath is shallow and it hurts. The passeur makes a low sound, impatient, subtle, and so they creep on. And everything now seems condensed; everything seems bristling and stark. The grey silk of the corn, the creak of boots, the night air on his face, the smell of rot, the stars above. His calves ache, his thighs ache. Night birds call, clouds bundle across the sky. Down in the mud, they edge onwards, creeping towards a different, deeper darkness.

The little party huddles up against a fence; branches creak in the wind. Whispered instructions: they climb the fence in turn, and on the far side gather under the cover of the trees. No moonlight here; pitch black. With a click of the tongue, the passeur leads them off again, this time walking upright along what seems to be a proper path, instinctually known. It is strange to go upright now. The eyes adjust; he can pick out branches against the sky, slender tree trunks.

But then off to the left, there’s movement, noises. He stops, bristling, breath caught, and then it’s just rustling, snuffling. A badger, or a hedgehog perhaps, making its way through the fallen leaves. And they carry on, treading through the darkness, hands raised against the whip of unseen branches, moving through an entirely different world.

Then the darkness begins to thin; tree trunks are grey against the sky, and the passeur’s shape moves across the lightness, and then Suzanne’s, and they are out at the far edge of the woods. A stream murmurs to itself; it catches moonlight. Single file, they follow its course upstream, walking between the woods and the water. On the far bank lies the open countryside of the Free Zone.

He sees the moon’s reflection on the water. The white disc struggles to disperse and then shivers itself back together, then breaks apart again. He slows, stands, watches. The stone, the water, the moon; he sees himself like Friedrich’s painted men, transient, contemplating the enduring, changing, ancient moon. But he is staring downward here, not up towards the heavens. He closes his eyes.

The schoolgirl limps on raw feet.

The patron opens his tobacco pouch.

Paul Léon shambles down the rue Littré.

The priest slides past him on the stairs.

Alfy Péron’s blunt fingertip taps a five-hundred-franc note.

Mary Reynolds ushers him in.

Marcel Duchamp lifts his knight.

Lines crease round Jeannine Picabia’s eyes.

He opens his eyes again, and the reflected moon breaks, resolves, and breaks, and this is the lie of it, the willing delusion — there is nothing eternal here. Given time enough — and time just keeps on ticking by — even this will cease. The water wears the rock, the rock crumbles, the water dries, the moon itself will fall to dust and there will be no one left to contemplate it.

“Pssst!”

He glances round. Suzanne waves him on with wide furious sweeps. He strides to catch up with her.

They cluster at the upended roots of a fallen tree. The trunk lies across the stream; branches stand like ski-poles, hand-to-hand. On the far side lie the raked lines of a vineyard. There’s a cluster of low buildings beyond that; the dwellings are in darkness, but the light is gathering at the edges of the sky. The far bank is the Free Zone. They still have some way to go on the other side before sunrise.

Suzanne does not look at him. She is seething with irritation. One would think, now, in the midst of all this, he would at least pay attention, could at least follow instructions. Her shoulders up, her back narrow, she treads across the tree trunk and it feels briefly like girlhood, gymnastics; she hops down on the other side. There she stands in the Zone Libre, while he still stands in the Zone Occupée, under the trees. She peers across as he makes the first tentative steps out on to the trunk, grasping for handholds. He follows her across, into this new place. They make their way through the fields, along the hedgerows and the ditches, in the cold breaking dawn.

—

His boots are worn to shreds. Her shoes are thin as skin. The autumn sun is too bright, too low, and they are walking directly into it, squinting and sore. He turns the pebble round in his mouth, slips it across his tongue to rest in the other cheek.

“I’m thirsty,” she says.

“I know.”

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

“You should get a sucking stone.”

“I don’t want a sucking stone.”

They come upon a fall of rocks by the roadside. She halts, sinks down on a boulder and rests her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands. She does not move. He waits, standing, for her to get up again; then, when she does not shift, he sinks down on his haunches beside her and waits like that for a while too.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

Silence.

“Come on, then.”

Silence. Then she shakes her head.

He glances off along the road, then turns to look back the way they’ve come. Then, fingertips to the ground for balance, he gazes at her hunched, exhausted form. They can’t stay here.

He gets up; his joints creak. He offers her his hand.

“Come on,” he says. “Hop up now.”

She just lifts her head and looks at him. These past days have transformed her. Her skeleton is making a show of itself.

“I thought you wanted to get to Roussillon?” he asks.

A blink, and nothing more. It seems she is beyond goading.

“Once you’re up and going, you’ll hardly notice.”

“Every whore of a step hurts. How could I not notice?”

He takes her hand then and hauls her to her feet. She protests, but stumbles up. He hooks her arm through his and they take a step.

“Tell me,” he says, “where does it hurt?”

She starts with her toes: the agony that is her left little one, the raw lump to which it has been reduced. The way her shoes pinch and rub, the way her socks are worn thin on the ball of the foot and the skin worn raw beneath as a result; how her ankles ache; how she has dreadful cramps in her calves, and terrible stiffness in her hip from sleeping on floors and the bare ground. He murmurs agreement and they take another step together; they walk on.

Soon the road begins to climb, a steady, fatiguing slog, and they fall silent once more.

“What about you?” she asks after a while.

“Oh, me,” he says. “You don’t want to hear about that.”

The two of them trudge on through the evening as it falls, and he tells her anyway, about his sore feet and his rickety knees and his burning belly and the twinge of his scar, and his backache and the nerve that fires off in his neck, and the boil on his shoulder blade, the poison of which is making his whole shoulder throb.

She nods silently and they walk on together, sticks and rags, a broken bundle, barely there at all.

The slow unpeeling of the road is a sticking plaster from skin. And each step is the point of severance, each step is to be steeled against and endured. As the light fades he watches his boots, wrecked, as they lump themselves forward, watches the ground as it lurches and sinks and swells away and back. His boots are coated in dust; they are bloody with dust. The dust is red.

In the low light, he lifts his head to see that the roadside banks are crumbling red earth. The cliffs above are veined with rust and blood. The road sweeps towards these cliffs, and as the road rises and lurches upward like a key change, the cicadas start to sing. And on the top of the cliffs, a little town grows like lichen on the blood-red rocks. They have travelled, through a rosary of days, through a decade of weeks, from one world into another. Roussillon. Rousse: of course it’s red.

They climb towards it.

It is small-windowed, shuttered, huddled tight, its back turned towards the world. As the two of them slog uphill, the wind grows sharper, more scuddy; it twists this way and then that; it’s in their faces, in their eyes, teasing out Suzanne’s hair from under her scarf, pulling at their jackets, stirring his beard, spinning leaves and seeds and bits of grass into whirlwinds and blowing dust into dry eyes, and it’s too much, really it is too much to contend with now, that the wind should blow full in their faces.

A church clock strikes the hour; the chimes are broken and scattered by the breeze. Suzanne moans in complaint and he nods in agreement.

They shamble past the front of the first house. It is locked tight; the iron homunculi that hold the shutters back during the day are fallen forward drunkenly for the night.

The road is cobbled now. There are sleeping shops, a fruit tree splayed against a wall; the ghost of a clematis climbs over a door; a cat ambles from an alleyway and stops to stare at them. There is a sign. An hotel. Hôtel de la Poste. He tugs on her arm, tilts his head towards the building. She nods. They stumble over the cobblestones towards it.

“We’re here,” she says.

“Thank God,” he says.

“Just don’t do anything stupid,” she says. “Don’t mess this up now, please.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN ROUSSILLON, October 1942

The day is white and full of clattering, talk: the walls strain and buckle in the wind.

The two of them lie side by side, still as figures on a tomb, socks and shoes pulled off, feet patched with blood and scabbed and stinking. The bed is narrow and their shoulders touch.

They breathe. Just for a while they are oblivious. The white light and the noise and the buffeting of the wind do not trouble their sleep.

When the sun eases in through the slots in the shutters, it makes her surface and she feels the press of her shoulder against his shoulder and she curls round on her side, putting space between them. Through the thin walls comes the sound of voices, of a radio, of footfalls, the chink of glasses and china. Mice rustle beneath the floorboards; they scamper in the ceiling. He breathes beside her; she sleeps again.

The sunlight fans across the floor and then begins its slow retreat. Shadows deepen and spread like floodwater.

In the evening, they stir and wake to a blue room, moonlight sliced by shutters. He eases on his boots, wincing, and stumbles out through the hotel yard to the necessary house. The little room is vertiginous and breezy, perched on the edge of a crevasse, a sheer stinking drop beneath.

She, meanwhile, limps out to the town square. She fills the washstand ewer at the fountain. The water plummets into the enamel and the spray touches her face and it is cool and sweet. There are lights lit at the cafés, and old men in blue work-jackets drink rosé and talk, and men in shabby city suits and women with faded feathered hats are out taking the air; they give her long low looks and walk on, and murmur with each other, knowing her for a newcomer and one of their own, but remaining discreet in case she does not wish to be acknowledged. And she, for now, is happy simply to be alone.

—

They take turns washing in cold water at the washstand. When they are done, she lifts down the bowl and soaks her feet.

“What,” he asks, “do you think of the place?”

She scratches at a flea bite, looks at him. “We know that it’s safe,” she says. “More or less.”

“There seems to be no plumbing to speak of.”

She shrugs. Does it matter? “What we need to do now is register at the Mairie. Once we’ve done that we can get our new ration cards.”

“We make ourselves official?”

“I don’t see that we can do otherwise, if we want to buy bread. We are in a separate jurisdiction now; we should be all right.”

He whistles out a breath.

“I can’t see them coming all the way here to look for us, can you? We don’t matter that much.”

—

He edges in behind her into the hotel dining room. It is packed tight, elbow-to-elbow. Jumbled with noise.

Madame shows them to a tiny table, and provides an off-ration stew of game and vegetables and barley. Globs of fat glisten on the surface. The meat falls to fibres on the tongue; the vegetables melt. It is impossibly good. They are rendered dumb by taste, by the dope of calories.

Suzanne does well; he watches as she does well. They are introduced to the people on neighbouring tables; she manages warm and easy conversation about nothing. He admires this as one might a coin plucked from an ear, or a fancily shuffled pack of cards. He can see that it’s done well, but can’t ever see himself mastering the trick.

The friends arrive — the Lobs — and Suzanne is delighted, seems astonished by their actuality. Kisses with Yvonne and her brother Roger, Yvonne’s husband, Marcel, leaning in to shake hands but then abstracting himself and standing stiffly back. There is a big old house just outside the town, belonging to the family; they are muddling along together, all very Grand Meaulnes. He sips his wine and watches the open gabbling mouths, picks out bits of conversation. The opinions and advice and suggestions about work that might be got, about accommodation that might be sought — they can’t lodge at the hotel indefinitely — and introductions that might be made. The bodies press too close, the walls are narrow round him; there is too much noise. He has been too long in silence, too long in solitude, too long upon the road.

He drinks his wine. He lifts crumbs from the tabletop with a fingertip. He nods his assent if his assent seems to be required.

The radio is switched on to warm up. Madame tunes it to Radio Londres and keeps the volume low, and in the packed dining room of the Hôtel de la Poste everyone falls silent, and they listen to the news from elsewhere, to the French speaking to the French.

—

The wind here has a mind of its own. It billows, blusters, darts, skirls around: you don’t know what direction to expect it from. He ducks out of the gritty street and into the post office.

The postmistress’s accent is educated but it still has the local wet, rolling rs, and a g where no g is generally required. She is handsome, dark-skinned, dark-eyed, with a flash of grey at the right temple. She smiles at his accent, but it’s clear that strangers are no longer strange round here. She makes no remark about its destination, just weighs the letter on her scales with her little row of shining weights, licks a thumb and flips through her book of stamps. Why indeed should there not be easy traffic between the Free Zone and the Free State?

He leaves the post office with a disproportionate sense of achievement — a letter sent to his mother, reassuring her of his well-being, requesting his allowance, which will make things here so much easier — but steps out into stink, and the cobbles tumbling with squares of newspaper — lavatory-cut newspaper — that have already been put to full and thorough use. He dodges his way through them, disgusted, making his way to the Mairie, thinking of the man who’d wanted to shake the hand that wrote Ulysses, who was told that there were other things that same hand had also done.

In the chilly formal room of the Mairie, reluctant to sign, he turns the pages of the register and notes the cascade of displaced French arriving from the north, the scattering of foreign names within it. There is even an Irishwoman settled here. A Miss A. N. Beamish.

“The streets are filthy,” he observes to the clerk.

“Ah yes,” the clerk says. “That’ll be the wind. The WCs here empty over the cliffs. This kind of wind, it blows the paper right back up again.”

“Is there nothing to be done?”

A shrug. “The wind changes. It blows it all away again.”

Freud, he thinks, might have had a thing or two to say about this place.

—

The next day stray rank papers linger in corners and gutters and shuffle round like last year’s leaves. He and Suzanne sit outside the cobbler’s workshop, on the cold stone bench, threadbare socks side by side while their shoes are being resoled. They’ve bought pastries from Gulinis’; they pick off fragments and melt them on the tongue, burst raisins between aching molars. Suzanne gets the hiccups. There’s the sound of children playing in the schoolyard below, and the tap-tap-tap of the cobbler’s hammer behind them, and the smell of bread and of leather and latrines, while he calculates silently how long their funds can be expected to last at the current rate, how soon his allowance can be expected to arrive: there has been a sharp increase in expenditure, what with the hotel room and restaurant meals and pastries and shoe repairs. They are not living hand-to-mouth on filched turnips and carrots and sleeping in hayricks any more. Their stack of cash is down to a sliver. Work, he supposes, must be found.

“What’s up with you?” Suzanne asks.

“Nothing of nothing,” he says.

He pulls at a flake of pastry, and a sturdy woman in tweeds goes by, tugged along by Airedale terriers on leads. She nods, smiles to the two of them. This must be Miss A. N. Beamish. No one ever looked less French.

—

More people arrive, day by day; they clamber out of packed-tight buses. They slide off the backs of wagons. They come stumbling in on foot along the road. They are travel-worn and bleary, bundled up in crumpled clothes, dusty hats shoved down on their heads, and by their flinching gait it’s clear their boots are martyring them. They nag and snipe and cling to each other. And when they spot him there’s that wary catch of eye, the nod: he has, he realizes, become one of them: he has joined the community of the dispossessed.

He passes the tweedy woman again, this time in the town square. She has nothing of their hunted, ragged air about her. And the dogs: they make her seem established here. Dogs imply domesticity, permanence, decisions made.

“You must be new,” she says. She speaks in French, formally, but the accent carries Irish threads. “We haven’t met. Beamish. Anna.”

“Enchanted.” He squats to fuss her dogs.

“You are lodging at the Hôtel de la Poste, I imagine?”

He nods.

She leans closer to stage-whisper, still in French, “Between you and me, that place is a dump.”

The dog rolls on its back. He scratches at its bristly chest. He hides a smile.

“That daft creature would take any amount of that,” she says.

He looks up at the soft underside of the woman’s chin as she peers down at him. He says in English, “We had Kerry Blues. At least, my mother did.”

There is a strange comfort in speaking those actual words in that actual language. The way they are pinned to that particular moment and that particular place: the damp muzzle, the slate-grey pelt under his hand, the sweet old fool of a dog. And his words make the woman’s face break into a delighted grin.

“An Irishman!” she says. “My word!”

He wobbles upright, offers his hand; she shakes it, brisk and vigorous.

“Well, fancy that.” A moment’s delighted silence, contemplating him, clasping his hand.

“We’ve just arrived,” he says. “We’re still finding our feet.”

“Oh, we can help you find them, me and my pal. You’ll soon forget your feet were ever missing.” She lets his hand go. “You’ll take a drink,” she says. “Come on.”

—

“What do you do here?” he asks. “I mean, how does one get by?”

“I have my royalties. That keeps us ticking over.”

“Oh. You’re a writer?”

She is reaching for the wine. “Am indeed.”

“I don’t think I know your work.”

She wafts away any notion that he might. “I write racy novels. Educated fellow such as yourself.” She shrugs. “And anyway, I have a pen name, people think I’m a chap.”

“But they must sell, if you can live on your royalties.”

“They do indeed.”

He raises his glass to her. “Félicitations.”

“You’re a writer yourself, then?”

Out across the square, the fig tree droops above the stone bench, the fruit already stripped, the leaves heavy and suggestive. He feels suddenly guilty, exposed.

“What makes you say that?”

She smiles. “There’s a tell. Your face…” She wafts her hand. “It did a thing when I mentioned royalties. So I deduce from that, and from the way you speak, that you must be a writer.”

“Writing has occurred,” he concedes.

“Ha!” She leans away, studies him a moment, then reaches over to refill his glass. “Tell me all your troubles.”

“Ah. Well. You know how it is.”

Inwardly, he is walking through the cemetery at Père Lachaise, packed tight with massive monuments to the brilliant dead. Not a patch of grass on which to pitch his own rotten little tent. No certainty now that he even wants to, not any more.

“No, I don’t. How is it?” Miss Beamish asks.

He sits back. “James Joyce was a friend of mine.”

“Oh no.”

“I used to help him with his work. With whatever he needed, really. I was a secretary to him.”

She shakes her head. Tuts.

“Finnegans Wake,” he says. “I helped him with that, and I worked on the French translation.”

“Oh you poor thing.” Her face is a parody of sympathy. She shakes her head. “Being friends with a genius.”

She waves the waiter over, holds up the empty pichet for a refill. Then she turns back to him, reverting to English.

“But what was this writing that did occur, despite your difficulties?”

He raises a shoulder. “It never came to very much.”

“Get away of that with you.”

He catches her smile. He knows he will be half-cut and stinking of booze by the time he gets back to Suzanne, and that Suzanne will be cross and say that she isn’t cross, and that this state will go on for days, but it is a long time since he has felt so entirely at his ease, a very long time indeed, and it is worth the price that must be paid for its continuance.

“And now,” he says, “I just can’t see the point of it at all.”

“Because of the war?” She tilts her head, considering, as she refills their glasses. “There’s still the oldest and best reason. Even in war, even in any circumstances, really. That still applies.”

“What’s that then?”

“Spite,” she says.

He snorts.

“No, I’m serious,” she says, not very seriously. “You need a bit of spite, a bit of venom, to keep you going. Particularly at the start, when no one gives a damn what you’re up to.”

“Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“And then, of course, it’s necessary.”

“Necessary?”

“If one is not writing, one is not quite oneself, don’t you find?”

And he thinks: the sweaty sleepless nights in Ireland, heart racing, battling for breath. Frank’s gentle company the only thing that could calm him. The two things are connected: the writing and the panic. He just had not put them together, until now.

“It’s like snails make slime,” she’s saying. “One will never get along, much less be comfortable, if one doesn’t write.”

He huffs a laugh.

“So.” She shrugs. “There you are. You’re stuck with it.”

He raises his glass. She chinks it.

“To spite,” she says.

“And slime.”

They drink.

—

There are voices beyond the wall; there are voices beyond all the walls: there are voices above the ceiling, and in the adjoining bedrooms and down the corridors and in the lounge. The hotel heaves with people and they are talking, talking, talking, chewing, swallowing, sweating, pacing, pissing, screwing, sniffing, and talking, talking, talking, talking, talking, on and on, endlessly and everywhere, words words words, and bodies packed tight, heaving over and around each other like insects, like grubs and talking swallowing chewing sniffing on and on and on. This place is an anthill; it crawls and hums and ticks and shivers, everyone treading their own shit into the ground beneath their feet. The wind wails and tugs at the shutters and lifts tiles and makes them tap and clatter, and when there is nothing else, when there’s a moment’s pause in all of that, which is only in the three a.m. pitch-black horrors of the soul, the mice still scratch loud in the laths and the cockroaches click under the skirting boards, and Suzanne still breathes and breathes and breathes beside him. He aches for distance, for space, for silence, for his tiny old apartment back on the rue des Favorites. Where there was solitude and peace, and it was his.

He stares now at the three words he has written. They are ridiculous. Writing is ridiculous. A sentence, any sentence, is absurd. Just the idea of it: jam one word up against another, shoulder-to-shoulder, jaw-to-jaw; hem them in with punctuation so they can’t move an inch. And then hand that over to someone else to peer at, and expect something to be communicated, something understood. It’s not just pointless. It is ethically suspect.

And yet he needs it. As Miss Beamish said. He has to make the slime that will ease him through the world.

He gleans potatoes left in the muddy margins, apples dropped from the back of the cart. Suzanne, meanwhile, visits her friends. She talks with Madame at the hotel and with the local women. Finding things out. This is, of course, also useful. There is labouring work to be had on a couple of the local farms. Chopping logs, pulling crops, tending the vines. Would he take it? He does not want to take it. He asks when he can start.

The church bell chimes the angelus three times a day. The little cafés shut at ten. It gets cold. In the dark chill room at the Mairie, the blue ink of his signature is shut tight inside the pages of the Register of Aliens. At night, he lies awake while the lost souls twist and mutter in their sleep. All it would take is an outside request for information. An audit. All it would take is for the Geste still to be on the hunt, or to stumble accidentally upon them in the hunt for someone else. He need do nothing to provoke disaster now. It’s inherent in their existence here. That it could all collapse to ruins in a breath.

He blunders through to breakfast and Madame has the morning bulletin on. He sips ersatz coffee and stares over Suzanne’s shoulder at the dreadful green wallpaper, and Suzanne stares across the room, over her cup, around the people gathered there; they fall silent and they listen. They learn that they are no longer in the Zone Libre: that this has become the Zone Sud. The Axis powers have extended military administration below the demarcation line. The wire has been rolled out round the whole of France. They are all now chickens in a coop, the lot of them.

Suzanne’s sharp eyes slip to his and catch. He sets his cup down, reaches out to her, but she doesn’t take his hand.

“Chances are they won’t come here,” she says.

It is a flimsy enough chance. In the dining room, the guests remain quiet. Madame plods over to the radio set and switches it off sharply, as if it were itself responsible.

“Everyone’s in the same boat,” Suzanne says. “It’s just a question of waiting. The war can’t go on for ever.”

He nods. He thinks, it doesn’t have to. “Well,” he says. “I have to get to work.”

—

There is frost on the ground. His toes are numb in his stupid boots. He walks the long lane down to the vineyard.

The vines are bare, the leaves fallen. The lad, Fernand, is half his age, and is showing him the ropes. The light makes him squint; it is too much. Van Gogh’s paintings: those dim muddy northern scenes, the industrial dirt and misery; but then he’s bowled over by the southern light, by these sun-saturated yellows, by this exact blue. Art is such a consolation. If he himself could paint — but he cannot paint. He turns the collar up on his coat: the faint whiff of it even now, cheroots and lemon. He is marching down the vineyards with a half-bushel basket, a roll of twine, a knife, wearing a dead man’s coat, while the German Army snakes out along the lanes and trackways like poison in the blood, and he daydreams about Van Gogh, and makes nothing happen.

“Come, let me show you,” says the boy. “You must pay close attention, the knife is sharp.”

The lad is vouvoyering him, being well brought up: the state he’s in, he has hardly earned the formal mode. At the foot of the slope they step in between the rows of vines. Fernand bends, his young fingers feeling through the splayed, sinewy growth.

“Now watch.”

He takes out a stubby, vicious little knife, the steel blade scraped and scored with striations from the whetstone. He makes a swift sloping cut. He lifts away a horizontal arm of vine, dumps it into his basket.

“These ones here, they fruited this summer. They have to go.” He cuts again, lobs aside another sinewy growth.

“Right.”

The lad scrolls out a length of twine, bends the remaining shoots down to the supporting wires and ties them off.

“Like this,” he says, “One left, one right, spread just so. You understand?”

“I think so.”

The boy smiles. His teeth are white against his tanned skin. It is one of those faces that will be deep in wrinkles by the time he’s thirty. He returns to the work and with three deft cuts he finishes the vine, one to the left shoot, one to the right. “On the central shoot, count three strong buds, then cut.”

He leaves the vine standing like the Cooldrinagh roses in the autumn: neat, abrupt, having been shown who’s boss.

“Now, you — this one here. I’ll watch.”

The palm-worn haft in his right hand, he reaches into the vine and grips the summer’s growth. He copies Fernand’s sharp angled cut. The boy nods approvingly.

He ties the stems down, clips them back, cuts away the central shoot.

“Good. If you need me, I shall be off along the next row, over there.”

He gets to work. He bends, cuts, ties, straightens, dumps the waste aside. He bends, cuts, ties, straightens, dumps the waste aside. He unbuttons the coat. Later, he takes it off entirely and lobs it on to the grass and it lies forgotten.

The rhythm of the work loosens his thoughts; they begin to shift and slide. He’s no longer where he is; time passes differently: an empty train station, the rub of a blistered heel, and the evening soft, and someone watching and someone being watched. And while he drifts with these thoughts, the blade slips and sheers aside, and instead of grapevine he slices deep into the ball of his thumb.

There is a moment’s pause between the damage done and the pain of it. He lifts the knife out of the flesh. He watches as the wound opens like a little mouth: blood beads there and rolls and drips. Blood slides across his hand and falls to the parched winter grass. It’s only then that he starts fumbling for a handkerchief, and his head swims.

The boy looks over. The handkerchief is wrapped tight and useless, already red and wet with blood. The boy comes running.

—

They sit him down in the dim kitchen, where it is warm and smells of woodsmoke and onions. Madame fusses, dabs on alcohol, fixes strips of sticking plaster to hold the wound together, then binds the hand with gauze. He winces. His arm throbs up to the elbow. The blood still comes, though slower now.

Monsieur sets a tumbler down in front of him; it has an inch of brandy in it, and Madame drops a lump of sugar in and crushes it and stirs. She has a round face, red cheeks, her chin sweetly fuzzed with down.

Monsieur scrapes out a chair and sits. He pours himself a drink too. “Plenty round here are missing a finger or two.”

He nods, but then regrets it. It makes his head swim.

The farmer takes a battered old tin from his breast pocket, and proffers it. “Cigarette?”

“Thank you.” With his good hand, he teases out a cigarette and tucks it between his lips. It’s a ready-made, he notices. He hasn’t had one of those in a while.

The farmer heaves himself up to light a spill at the fire.

“It’s good?” Monsieur asks when both their cigarettes are lit.

It is toasty and soft.

“That’s American tobacco, you know.”

He takes the cigarette from his lips, turns it. Of course it is.

“I have my contacts,” Monsieur says. “So. We get hold of things.”

“Ah, for God’s sake.” This is Madame now. “Can’t you see the poor fellow’s exhausted? All the Jews are. They’re worn out, the poor things.”

“He’s not a Jew. Are you a Jew, Irishman?”

“No, I don’t have that distinction.”

Madame wafts a hand. “Pft. It’s all the same. Just you leave him be.”

She dumps a saucer down between them for the ash. Then she bustles off and busies herself about the stove, riddling the grate, clattering the pans, slamming the oven door.

He sips his brandy and the farmer talks.

“I wonder why you had to come here. Since you are not a Jew. And you are from a neutral country, Ireland, and so you should not be harassed in Paris, you should be able to get by. I don’t think you are a homosexual?”

He raises a shoulder. “I don’t think so either.”

“So I wonder what it was that you were up to, up there in the north.”

“This,” he says, “and that.”

The farmer nods. “A busy man. You’ll be bored here.”

“I have work.”

“But perhaps you’ll want other kinds of work.”

He rubs at the back of his neck. He suspects, but is not certain of what is not being said. The cigarette is the clue. Contraband. Supplied by the Allies to the Maquis. “I think my companion would disapprove.”

“Well,” the farmer says. “You think about it.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Then you tell your companion what you’re going to do.”

“Is that how it works?”

The farmer laughs, sets his cigarette down in the saucer. His wife, on the other side of the kitchen, lets out a snort.

“No.” The farmer raises his glass in a toast. They chink. They both drain the dregs. The liquid is thick and crunches with grains of sugar.

—

Suzanne has wedged a chair in between the bed and the window, for the light. A bolt of thick grey wool is spread over her knees and the counterpane. It’s a blanket; she is under commission to turn it into a coat. She is hand-stitching the whole thing. It’s trying to the eyes and on the hands. She looks up when he comes in; she says good evening, she notices the bandage. Tuts.

“What did you do now?”

“It’s nothing. Madame cleaned it up, so…” She doesn’t offer any further comment, so he just continues, “…it will be fine.”

He opens his bag, wincing, and lifts his supplies out on to the bed. The room is stuffy and cold, and there are voices to be heard from beyond the wall. She gets up and folds the fabric away, stabs her needle into it. Kneading at a shoulder muscle, she inches round the edge of the bed to inspect the haul.

One-handed, he unfurls a parcel of waxed paper. A clutch of olives. He unfolds another napkin and there is a small, fresh goat’s cheese and a cube of quince jelly. He lifts out a wine bottle; it’s unlabelled, the cork already drawn then shoved halfway back in. He plucks the bottle open, sloshes wine into a tooth glass, hands it to her. He sits. The mattress dips. The nest of olives tips over sideways, the cheese slides downhill towards him and he has to catch it and put it back. She hands him the glass. When he lifts his elbow to drink, she has to lean away. No room to park his arse, no room to lift an elbow, not even certain he can still tell one from the other any more. His head is locked solid with it all, with the weeks of it; the tumblers of his mind are rusted and they’re stuck and he can’t make them shift, and he can’t think for all the closeness, the crowding, everything jammed up around him and yet nothing within reach, everything bundled and boxed and getting under his feet and in his way.

“We are invited over for dinner on Saturday, to the Bonnellys’,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.

“Oh. Good.” She takes the glass off him again and sips.

He divides the olives, the cheese, the preserve, on to the two napkins. There is an extra olive so he gives it to her; he breaks the cheese into uneven pieces and sets the larger portion on her napkin. He hands the meal to her. They eat wordlessly, crumb by crumb, pausing to spit pits into their palms. After the last sticky swallow, there is silence between them again.

He holds up the bottle; she proffers the glass. The wine sloshes in.

“They seem to be very pleasant people,” he manages.

“Oh yes,” she says.

“Generous, too.”

“Good.”

“All this for just an afternoon’s work.”

She blinks at him. “I am doing what I can, you know.”

“I know.”

“I am going mad here, stuck here, stuck with this. My hands hurt.”

He nods. He knows.

“Just like you to be like that.”

He hadn’t realized that he was being like anything. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing ever touches you.”

She’s flushed now. “In truth, I think it’s all the same to you, all of it. If we stay in Paris and die or if we hide in a hole here and go mad, and then die all the same. You do not even notice.”

“I am not finding it easy, Suzanne.”

“Pft.”

“What?”

She looks at him, hard and level, cool with disappointment. She could say: I saw your notebook, back in the apartment, full of nonsense. You spend your time doodling and scratching things out. That is just how you are. You won’t make anything of anything at all.

But she says, “And now we are stuck here, caught like rats in a trap in this dreadful hotel. Even with all the trouble and fatigue of getting here, we are still not safe.”

“We’re alive. So we’re rather lumbered with the rest.”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“You think we should stop, then?”

“Stop?”

“Stop. Just — give up.”

She makes that movement of the mouth, the lips bunched together, the corners turned down, which passes with her sometimes for a shrug.

He could say: I know what stopping looks like. It looks like a man stepping out into the sky. It looks like the ground racing up to meet you. It looks like a black comma on the cobblestones. It looks like a pool of blood.

But he says, “Is that what you suggest?”

“I’m not suggesting anything,” she says.

“No.” He drinks, sets the tooth mug aside, picks up a crumb of cheese. His injured hand rests limp in his lap. “I see that.”

She glares at him, brittle and unhappy. Too much store had been set upon the destination. Continuance here, inhabitance — that had barely crossed her mind. Now they’re stuck with the day-to-day of it, the day-after-day of it, for as far as the eye can see, and it might as well be eternity; and they are tangled together, twining round each other; they are all elbows, feet and claws.

“Do the Lobs have a piano, perhaps, out at Saint-Michel?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

“Perhaps you could go and play there. That would be good for you. They wouldn’t mind.”

She nods.

“Maybe you could even take pupils again. There must be young ones around here who’d otherwise miss out. You’ve always loved teaching. That would help.”

She looks at him. Then she says, “You’re so much better at this than me.”

“No,” he says. “No, I’m not.”

She nods, though. And then she says, “Perhaps we can find somewhere more out of the way. A house just outside town. So if the place is raided, we won’t be stuck here like fish in a barrel.”

“I’ll ask a friend.”

Suzanne blows a puff of breath.

“What?”

“A friend.”

“What?”

“You.”

“What?”

“You and your friends.”

“What do you mean, me and my friends?”

“You make friends like dogs make puppies.”

He frowns at this. Promiscuously? With pleasure? By the half-dozen? He doesn’t ask. But Anna Beamish will have an idea or two where they might look for more out-of-the-way accommodation. And he doesn’t mention his unsettling conversation with Monsieur. No point in meeting that particular trouble halfway.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN LA CROIX, January 1943

This is the place, then: the little house on the edge of town. He climbs the creaking stairs. The wind rattles the shutters against their latches. He has Shem’s old coat on, a muffler drawn up over his mouth and nose and dampened by his breath.

The upstairs room swells wide and dim, slope-ceilinged, with a window in each gable. There is a bedstead, an armoire, a small table and chair. The walls are rose-painted plaster. Beyond the back window, there’s just rattling, tormented branches, and black birds tumbling and skittering about. Looking out of the front window, across the road, the ground falls away sharply, so he stands now above the treetops and can see all the way across the valley to the distant mountains beyond. From here, turn right and walk ten minutes into town. Turn left and the nearest house is Miss Beamish’s, only just in sight, down at the crossroads.

This is a pool of space; this is a silence wide enough to swim in. If writing could happen at all, in these days, it would happen in a place like this. Here, perhaps, he could make a little slime to ease himself along.

He hears their voices rising up from the garden. Suzanne’s, as well as those of Marcel and Yvonne Lob. The professor has been doing great things with the grounds at Saint-Michel; he is not only supplying their own needs, but selling off the excess for a decent profit in Apt. Of course it is the right thing to do, to make the garden here profitable too. But what alarms him is the time that it implies. The waiting. That the seasons will have slid along from winter through spring and summer and back to autumn once more, and they’ll still be stuck here, eating garden peas and tomatoes and cooking their own onions in a stew. That by then the worst will not have happened, but then neither will anything else.

This waiting; this attentisme. It has become a deliberate decision. Everyone is waiting to see how grand events will fall before they’ll take a position, or do anything about anything at all. This is the politics of passivity, and it makes sense. But it is unconscionable. It is not to be borne.

He turns away from the window and clumps down the stairs. Suzanne, at that same moment, is coming in through the back door, her nose pink, her hands clamped under her armpits. There is a brightness about her that he hasn’t seen in a long while.

“You like it?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. “It will do very well.”

Yvonne and Marcel Lob come in behind her, crowd out the doorway’s light.

“One thing you’ll have to be sure of is a good supply of fuel,” the professor explains, as if this needed explanation. “It’ll be cold, a place like this, standing all alone. You could freeze to death out here, this winter.”

—

The wind is bitter; it makes him squint.

He eyes the copse of holm oak. In girth and stature, compared with the common variety, these oaks are barely more than weeds. There are half a dozen or so of them to be cut down, and the wood sawn and split and stacked on to a cart. He’ll get it done in a day, he reckons. He has been promised half of the wood in exchange for his work. The little copse means heat and cooking and warm water for the months to come.

They’d gathered wood in the park, they’d broken branches and filched planks. But he’s never cut down a tree before.

Still. How hard can it be?

He hefts the axe, swings it. It whacks against the trunk. The haft judders in his hands; the jolt of it travels up his arms and into his shoulders. The twigs shiver, the blade leaves a narrow split in the bark; and that is all.

He sets the axe down on its head, spits on his palms and rubs them together.

He lifts the axe and swings again. The bark opens a little wider.

He takes the coat off and lays it aside.

Later, he takes his jacket off and drops it on top of the coat.

Then he takes off his sweater and his shirt, and lobs them in the direction of the clothes pile. He works on in his singlet, the wind and winter sun creasing up his eyes.

His arms ache. His shoulders ache. His back aches.

It’s a different ache from usual. It’s not the stiff neck and tired eyes of before, not the tight cramp of study and neglect. And his head begins to clear; his thoughts are smoothed out and they begin to run. There are no knots. No tangles. No sudden snags. There’s just the swing of the axe, and the shift and twist of muscle, and the breath in and out of him, and the catch of it, of a deeper breath than usual, on his scar, like the tick forward of a second hand.

He works.

He is at Cooldrinagh, swaying high in a treetop, watching his mother cross the ground beneath him, her shins whacking against the sail of her skirt. He is huddled in his chair in the darkness of his college rooms, cold, deliberately alone. He is drifting in a morphine glow through billowing white curtains, and a line of pain that the blade made in him, waking now to the uneasy thrill of Shem’s face, and now to the new comfort of Suzanne’s, and now to his mother’s pinched visage. He is in that little café on the rue des Vignes watching Shem talk as though the world falling into ruins were some grand conspiracy against him. Two years he’s gone now, maybe even to the day — a sting to realize that things are slipping, blurring: he has lost track and doesn’t know the date. And if Shem had not died, and if he had fled south rather than to Switzerland, if he were here now, he’d have spread a handkerchief on the bank there and sat himself down on it, ankle on knee, dark glasses covering his eyes, hands folded on the head of his cane, hat tamped down, his good coat laid around his shoulders, watching him work. And he’d be griping. Small-town life, dear God, how does anybody stand it! The dogs following him around, and the food, and the state of his boots on these dreadful roads. C’mon now, c’mon for a glass of wine and a bite of dinner and a few songs, why don’t you? There must be somewhere in town where his name is still worth something, where a friend might stand him a drink, where he can caress a piano’s keys and sing a few old songs.

He glances down at his palms, at the puffs of unburst blisters, the seams of sweaty dirt, the puckered scar across his thumb where the knife had slipped. You wouldn’t catch Mr. James Joyce getting his hands roughened. Getting them dirty. At least, not this kind of dirt.

By nightfall, there’s a stump in the red earth. It twists its roots deep into the rocky soil.

He has started work on the second tree; he has taken a sappy, smashed bite out of its base. It shudders when he hits it.

—

He is splitting logs. There is rhythm to this work. His breath plumes and fades, plumes and fades.

The house is silent; Suzanne is out at Saint-Michel, playing the piano. The light lowers, the shadows lengthen, and there is, far off, the sound of an engine from the Apt road. The axe stilled, he listens. The rumbling grows; there is more than one engine. Diesel, heavy, getting closer. He whacks the axe into the chopping block, wipes his palms down his trousers. Gooseflesh prickles on his arms.

Because the roads are so quiet nowadays. Cars moulder in barns. Tractors serve as chicken roosts. Delivery trucks are solitary and infrequent. Bicycles are as cherished as firstborn sons, because there is no fuel now, not for ordinary people. There is only fuel for the government, the Army and the Geste.

He slips round the side of the house and peers out along the road. The rattle of the engines grows, and now there is the gritty peel of the tyres. And then, at the turn, light: the fence is illuminated in stark lines. The headlamps are sloped low and shaded for the blackout. There is no pause at the junction: the vehicles turn towards him with brutal self-assurance. They are passing now, shaking the ground beneath his feet, and he steps back deeper into the shadows, and the trucks thunder into town.

Round the back of the house again he snatches up the coat and drags it on. Suzanne, fingertips shifting their gentle pressure from key to key — no way to get word to her. And in town, the newcomers vanishing as the trucks appear; people slipping down alleyways and up flights of stairs and in through garden gates. If the trucks pull up outside the hotel, if soldiers descend and slam open doors and demand papers. So many people are so vulnerable there.

And if the troops are sent back out this way, to find the Irishman. It would only take a word.

He flits on into the woods, the ground rising, so that he is scrambling up, on hands and feet, through rocks and fallen pine needles. The stream of headlights continues off to his left. The trees baffle the sound and distort it, seeming close, then distant, then right up by him once again. He pulls himself up over roots and shivering dry scree until he reaches the top of the outcrop. His breath hurts; it catches on his scar. He squats down, his back against a tree, and stares out towards the town. He lights a cigarette and shakes out the match and squeezes the black tip till it is cool. He holds the match cupped in his palm: the woods are dry as tinder, even at this time of year. He watches the lights, the flick and smudge of them through the town, and smokes, his hand shaking. Then the lights slither off, along the road that curves away and descends steeply to the valley, and away, and they fade off into the distance. He taps ash into his hand and rubs his palms together. Cigarette clamped between his lips, he gets to his feet and begins the ungainly slither back downhill.

—

Heron-like, he hunches over his manuscript. He holds his pen in calloused fingertips.

The blankets are thrown back on the bed, the pillows are still dented with the press of their heads; the few clothes he is not actually wearing are slung over a chair. Suzanne is outdoors in the cold, digging over the ground, preparing it for the first seeds.

He has the old coat on, the collar drawn up, the mitts that Suzanne knitted on his paws, his muffler up over his nose. This room is right above the wood-burning stove and is the warmest part of the upper floor, but when the wind blows it whips the warmth away and even here it’s cold. He only notices afterwards.

Because the words now come. With a curve and loop and dip and stroke. The words keep happening, and he will not think too much about their coming but just let them come. At the foot of the page, he blows upon the wet coils, then turns the leaf and folds it flat, and on the verso the words go on, loop and dip and twist, as they have gone on now for weeks together. A stalagmite of heavy notebooks grows on the desk beside him.

From time to time there’s the cry of circling crows, or the noise of a horse and cart slowing for the turn at the crossroads. An occasional motor vehicle. People pass from time to time, exchange a few words, but it’s there-and-gone and does not intrude on his own words.

And so he thinks of none of it: not the presences nor the absences, neither the wide expanse of sky beyond his window nor the close grain of the wood under his hand, though all of it was necessary for this quiet alchemy to happen.

—

Writing lets him step aside, and time flows on without him. He sips his just-made cup of corn coffee and it’s ice-cold; he looks up from the morning and the light has gone. His shoulders ache. There’s a snag in his neck. Then headlamps blur the dark — and he gets to his feet, but he’s too slow to see the truck pass and so doesn’t know whether it was a patrol, or if it is one of the few remaining delivery vans, rigged up to run on gas, or wood chips, or old cooking oil.

You keep on going, don’t you, after all? The horrors build. You keep on doing what you do, out of spite.

He turns away from the window and his desk; he wraps his arms around himself and shivers and clumps downstairs. Suzanne isn’t there. He opens the back door and blinks out at her, standing in the chill spring evening, surveying her dug-over patch. Her hands are red with earth.

“Is that you?” she says. She looks round and her face is streaked with red.

“It is,” he says. “I was writing.”

“We’re almost out of firewood,” she says.

—

Newcomers still turn up in the town. They stumble off buses and hole up in the hotel. He makes friends there, in ones and twos, not by the half-dozen. Henri Hayden becomes a companion over chess; he’s an artist, and a blessing. In the evenings, they gather at Miss Beamish’s, Henri and his wife, Josette, he and Suzanne, Miss Beamish and her companion, also called Suzanne. They listen to the radio.

This is just another bubble. The bubble’s shrinking.

A farmer is shot dead. One bullet, neatly through the brain. The blood dries in the red soil. It’s known who killed him; it’s never spoken of. There’s a cloud around the man who did it, a haze of flies. Because this was a neighbour; this was somebody known to them all, over long years, the family over generations. The farmer had found a crate of cigarettes where there should not have been a crate of cigarettes. He reported it. He allowed the information to flow along the proper channels, rather than damming it or forcing it back upon itself, making it flow uphill.

When he sits alone and writes, it is to push against the closing walls of the bubble. The sides flex outward, just a little; he feels that he can breathe. When he blinks, his eyes feel sore against the lids. He’s always tired.

The prose creeps. Notebooks fill. A soft evening in Ireland, a redbrick villa, and the elderly and lame and syphilitic. An unseen man upstairs, dishing out pabulum, approval and opprobrium, entirely arbitrarily.

His handwriting shrinks too and becomes more careful. Everything is reduced, condensed. He commits just the essence of the thing to paper. Anything more than that would be a waste.

And when he surfaces to a cramped hand, a crick in the neck, the sunlight shifted across the floor, a sore blink, he knows that even to have written this little is an excess, it is an overflowing, an excretion. Too many words. There are just too many words. Nobody wants them, nobody needs them. And still they keep on, keep on, keep on coming.

At night, when they gather — he and his Suzanne, Miss Beamish and hers, sometimes the Haydens — to listen to the radio at Miss Beamish’s house, he notices that the gnomic messages on Radio Londres are increasing. They take up more and more of the broadcast time. The gathered company strain their ears through the noise and clutter of the attempts to block the signal, to catch hold of the surrealist fragments and Dadaesque cut-ups that mean something to somebody somewhere. The elephant broke a barricade. I repeat, the elephant broke a barricade…The blue horse walks on the horizon…Giraffes don’t wear false collars…Aunt Amélie cycled in shorts. Sometimes, in Miss Beamish’s sitting room, a head is shaken at the strangeness; sometimes an eye catches another eye and there’s a smile. The poetry of these utterances is intriguing. There are secret parcels and packets of meaning attached to them; they go unseen by all but the intended recipient.

—

The sun shines, and the leaves unfurl, and the shade deepens blue again beneath the trees, and the grapes swell, and in the streams the fish become fat and sluggish, and the birds hop through the inner storeys of bushes like they do every year; flights of them skim above the houses and through the town, and the boys take potshots at them, sharp-eyed and practised, and the women pluck the moth-light bodies and cook them so that the flesh falls from their greenstick bones.

He has become a creature of wire and rope: muscle twists over bone; tendon shifts under skin; skin becomes as brown as tea. He moves freely, lost in the mechanics of labour, less conscious of his physical self than he has been since he was a child. The stone sits in a cheek, is turned over, sent to rest in the other cheek. In solitude and silent work, his thoughts shift and slide across each other. There are patterns forming; they can be glimpsed in the corner of the eye. It doesn’t do to look directly: the pieces drift away like ice. But later, to sit down at his desk, to fill his pen, to trace this across a notebook’s whiteness, is to conjure the patterns back. To write is to drift along with the floe; it is to let the floe drift through him.

He walks out with Henri, and they drink a bottle of wine on a café terrace.

At night, he sleeps his black sleep, and it washes him quite clean.

When the day is bright and calm, and the mistral doesn’t blow, and there’s a warmth to the sunshine, and the air is sweet, and when in the evenings there is light and time and space to write in, it is all too easy to forget that their good luck is just the luck of the crow in the woods, the luck of the merely overlooked.

Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.

Henri Hayden can be heard well before he’s seen; he declaims the lines as he’s coming down the road. Irish and French sounds bulge out of the English verse, along with his native Polish.

He gets up from his seat and peers out of the window. His friend has a Collected Shakespeare clamped under his arm and is striding along with the ungainly confidence of the half-cut, having been to Miss Beamish’s for an English lesson. Miss Beamish is not a methodical teacher, but she is liberal with her rewards. He raises a hand and Henri pauses in the street, swaying slightly. They talk over the balustrade.

“Better keep it down, my friend,” he says to Henri in French. “You never know.”

Henri wafts the concern away. “But I must practise my English, so that when the Americans come I can welcome them properly in their own language. It’s only right.”

He is not sure that Shakespeare’s English, via Connemara, is likely to make much sense to a GI. He drops his voice further still. “Would it not be wiser to learn German?”

“Oh, they’re last week’s news, the Germans. They’re done for.”

“Henri. Be careful.”

“It’s the paperwork, you see. Each new country they go blundering into, wagonloads of new paperwork, all those forms and dockets.” He grins. “They’ve bitten off more than they can chew in Russia, now, you mark my words. All that bureaucracy will bring the Nazis to their knees.”

“Maybe they like paperwork,” he says. “Maybe they relish it.”

“Buggers.” Henri’s face falls, but he speaks in perfect English idiom. “I bet they bloody do.”

—

In the circumstances, to find oneself still continuing on with all the business of life, to keep on putting one foot in front of the other, taking one breath after the other, while so many others have just stopped, is uncomfortable. It’s not as though he thinks he’s worth the effort.

He pushes into the post office, making the bell ring, inhaling the universal post-office smell of manila, ink and gum. He catches a glimpse of the postmistress in the back room, her startled face turned towards the sound of the bell. There’s a man there too; he’s tucking a sheaf of letters into an inner pocket. A brisk, muttered exchange. She bustles out with a smile and the fellow slides out past the counter and gives him a nod, passing with a cloud of country smell of sweat and wine and livestock. The bell dings and the fellow is gone.

He exchanges courtesies with the postmistress. She checks the pigeonholes. He leaves with a letter from his mother.

He reads as he walks, past the end of the schoolyard where the children run and shout, past two little girls, who, pausing in their game with marbles and chalk, stare huge-eyed and watch the spindly giant pass, and then snort with laughter when he’s gone. He folds the cheque into a pocket.

News of the dogs, and Lily the maid, and Cooldrinagh now sold, and the new place half built — she is even going to call it New Place, which makes him smile — and Frank and Janet, of card parties and coffee mornings and church. Mollie who had walked the strand with him at Greystones, hair blowing, catching in her mouth. Sheila now settled comfortably in Wales with the girls and sending postcards, everybody well. But worried about him.

He turns it over, reads on to her signing-off, then folds it up and stuffs it away. It is warm and it is kind and it is concerned. It seems that they can only be close when they are at such a distance, when the whole of Europe stands at war between them. He should not be putting her through this, all this, all this worry. She is old, she is not well; she is his mother. That queasy umbilical tug. Still, he pulls against it.

He goes past the front of the house. He continues on past Miss Beamish’s, through the woods, following the road that winds downhill, underneath the cypresses. He walks as the red road fades to pink, out on to the limestone territory, as the road becomes a white line tracing through the vineyards. The far hills are white with bare stone like a fall of snow. His boots scuff white mud on to themselves.

He takes off his coat, slings it over an arm. Keeps on walking.

He could have stayed in Ireland. To save her this. Getting old and alone and worrying about him.

He is halfway up the slope of the ancient bridge before he notices where he is. Beyond the balustrade there’s a twenty-foot drop and white water churns over rocks below. He peers down: it’s barely a stream; it must have shrunk considerably over time, to have once merited a bridge like this.

When she is dead, he thinks, will the tug then not be to home, but down into the grave?

His friend just stepped out into the empty air.

The water tumbles, churns, it wears pits into the white rock. Beneath his hard palms, the stone is crumbly as lump sugar.

It had seemed brisk and simple, that step out of the window. But every moment leading up to that moment must itself have been a decision made.

He pushes away from the balustrade. He takes the slow way down, striding along the bridge, climbing the stile and then scrambling down to the water’s edge. A wading bird picks its way across the mud, and dips her beak down into it, and sifts the silt for food.

In the looped shade cast by the arches, he eases off his boots and socks and dips his feet into the stream. It is ice; it is vivid and it makes him gasp. His feet are all bones, bunions and blisters and ragged yellow nails as the water tumbles round them, and the one toe with the missing joint, as ugly as sin, and as human. He feels sorry for his feet; he knows what they’ve been through.

And so one finds one goes on living. One makes slime and one drags oneself along through the world. Because life is an active decision now. An act of resistance. And there is a certain satisfaction in it. One lives, however hard the struggle, to spite the cunts who want one dead.

—

He walks the dry miles back to the house in silence, skirting Suzanne hunched between her beanpoles, climbing the stairs to his desk. He is already elsewhere. Later she clumps around below, indoors; later still he smells soup. He will go down in a moment. But his pen moves across the page, and two men are contained within barbed wire; they walk parallel, pacing, disconnected and close. Contact, human contact: they crave it, and they shrink from it.

His pen spirals and loops across the paper.

The sun sinks. Then there are voices. Speaking urgently and hushed.

When he comes downstairs, parched and sore-eyed, the room is dim, the lamp not yet lit. It takes him a moment to see Suzanne at the table there, with her friend Yvonne hunched on the other side, her back to him, and Yvonne’s brother, Roger, standing in the open back door, smoking a cigarette.

“It’s the professor,” Suzanne says.

Yvonne turns round to look at him. Her face is blotted, swollen with tears. The professor is Marcel. Her husband.

“What happened?”

One of those half-breath silences, when someone has to say something that no one wants to hear again. “He’s been arrested.”

He draws out a chair, sits down with them. He feels a rush of sympathy for Yvonne, for the children, for her husband who he’s never really liked.

“What can we do?”

Yvonne wipes her cheeks. “I don’t know that there’s anything we can do. He wasn’t wearing his star or carrying his papers. So.”

“How did they know?”

“He was denounced.”

Roger speaks quietly. “We’ll think of something, Yvonne, don’t worry.”

“I don’t see what there is to think of.”

“Who denounced him?” he asks.

Yvonne shrugs, fierce. “We supply fruit and flowers in Apt — I should have insisted that I go instead. But we got too used to being safe. We got to expect that things would just be all right. But someone must have guessed, or suspected, and then…” She shakes her head.

It is late when the little group breaks up; it is an unhappy dispersal. They have arrived at no satisfactory conclusion. The professor can’t be proven innocent, since he can’t be proven not-Jewish. The only plan is that Yvonne assert her remaining rights as a Frenchwoman and a non-Jew; she must kick up as much fuss as possible, as though over some pet dog that has been impounded as a stray. Her man is not to be deported. If he must be detained, it must be in France. If she writes letters, makes appeals, makes a nuisance of herself, then maybe she can slow the deportation process, bog it down in paperwork, until something else happens and things change again. The war can’t go on for ever: Isn’t this what everybody says? That is the professor’s best hope, though it is a strange one to find oneself clinging to. That a French camp, like Drancy, with its unglazed windows and bare concrete floors, be considered a good. That his fate is just to wait there, as the war flares and fades around him.

When Yvonne and Roger leave, he goes through the evening rituals, aware for once of what are normally unconscious acts. He draws the shutters, bolts them, his hands old and knuckly and looking entirely alien to him. He is conscious of the barriers’ flimsiness, the arbitrariness of the space that they contain. He is conscious too of other spaces: the road down which Paul Léon had shrunk and faded; the concrete and worn grass ringed around with wire and Alfred Péron staring at the sky; a sunless cube in the depths of the Santé where chains hang from the wall; a swaying carriage rattling off towards the east, packed with deported people; his own skull and its pool of darkness, the shiver that grows at the base of it and slithers up into his hair.

Reaching round for the last shutter, he is leaning out into the empty night and is caught by the wide silence here. He feels observed. He goes to bolt the door. They have never been safe here, he knows; they had just failed to notice the danger. All it would take is a few guns, a few dogs, and the crows will be dealt with. Will be cleared entirely from the woods.

He climbs the stairs, rubbing at the back of his bristling neck.

She says, “I thought you would have heard us.”

“I was working.” He unbuttons his shirt, lifts it over his head. His shoulders ache.

“I thought you would have come down.”

“I did come down.”

Her lips twist.

“You could have called me,” he says. “If you’d called me I would have come.”

She blinks and looks away.

“Forgive me,” he says.

“We don’t all have your excuses. We don’t all have your consolations.”

He slings his trousers over the back of the chair, shakes his head, not understanding.

“Disappearing for hours like that.”

“I don’t disappear.”

“Even when you’re here, you’re not really here.”

She turns down the wick, blows out the flame. He climbs into bed beside her in the darkness. She shifts on to her side, away from him, dragging the blankets with her. Her breathing changes.

“What are we going to do?”

“The war will end,” she says. “We wait for that.”

“We have to do something.”

She makes a muffled noise. He looks at her dark head on the pillow.

“I can’t just wait,” he says, “to see what happens.”

She hefts the covers up over her shoulder. “Didn’t you learn anything from last time? Wasn’t that a big enough disaster?”

After a bit, he gets up and smokes a cigarette at the window. Miss Beamish’s house is unlit, but the windows catch a little moonlight. Beyond the road, the wind stirs the trees, and far away, over the treetops and across the valley, a light shines on the mountainside in contravention of the blackout. It flickers, flashes. It could just be the play of branches across a window. Or it could be that a message is blinking out into the darkness, that some kind of meaning is offered up into the night.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN THE VAUCLUSE, April 1944

Easter Sunday. There’s a run of farmers, tired women, slow-voiced farmhands, sleepy kids, down either side of the trestle table. It has been a warm and pleasant day, when you could slip into the delusion that, all around, the rest of the world went on just as it used to do. A haunch of pork has been roasted and demolished; scraps lie on the platter and from time to time someone helps themselves to a bit of cooked-crisp skin or a flake of meat. The talk hooks and twists itself together round him, and it is practical and about things and people he doesn’t know. He sits back from the table, a little out of the way, cradling his glass of wine. Suzanne sits in, her elbows perched, chin on hands, head tilted, engaged in a diagonal conversation with a woman further down the table.

“You know the family out at Saint-Michel?”

The fellow speaking to him is tipped back in his chair, leaning past the back of the man between them. He’s familiar, but then country folk are like that. The same few people swirling round and round and bumping into each other like flotsam in a whirlpool. The fellow sits with shirtsleeves rolled; his jacket is hanging from the back of his chair.

“Yes,” he says.

“Terrible business.” The fellow offers a hand. “I’m Bonhomme,” he says. “I’m a friend of Monsieur there, your employer.”

“The family believes the denunciation came from Apt,” he says, keeping his voice low. They are in good company here, but one must not make assumptions.

The fellow tilts his head. “It must have.”

He wonders at the certainty. And then he remembers where he’d seen this man: the back room of the post office, pocketing a sheaf of letters, the postmistress’s anxious look on noticing that they were observed. He was going through the mail. He must have been weeding out denunciations, betrayals, reports to the authorities. They could all of them have been informed on many times over, but the words not allowed to hit their mark.

“You keep busy, then?” he asks.

“There is always much to do.”

As they talk, a moth bumps at the candle-lamp, and he thinks of all those letters written, their earnest treachery, their interception and curtailment. The flames that do not catch.

He doesn’t notice Suzanne watching them, her eyes narrowing.

Bonhomme wafts the moth away, tilts the candle-lamp and opens it to light his cigarette, then closes the lamp again before the moth can blunder in and immolate itself. He speaks casually, but very low. “Are you looking for more work?”

“I have enough to get by.”

“Getting by,” Bonhomme says, “is just the half of it.”

“And the other half?”

“One must add something. Contribute.”

He nods slowly.

Bonhomme looks at him. A long, assessing gaze. He says, “I think you will.”

—

The moon is bright and high as they walk home. The cicadas are making a racket. They climb the hill, following the path alongside the vines. They pass through trees, then out into a meadow, where the grass is long and cows stand and stare at them. Above, the sky is vast and bright with stars. Disturbed by their passing, moths rise from the grass, fluttering in ghostly white spirals. It’s beautiful; Suzanne feels this as gooseflesh on her arms and a lightness in her chest, at the loveliness of it and its fragility.

He’s drunk, and so there’s no point talking to him. Hands stuffed into his pockets, he stumbles forward, leaning as though into a ferocious wind. The grass around his turn-ups goes hush, hush. And she knows that no good will come of talking.

“You’re drunk,” she says, nonetheless.

He considers this. “Yes,” he says.

Never sufficient to just take a glass, a taste. Oh no. Heads together with that maquis leader all night. And now he is ripped to bits he’ll be as unshiftable as an oil stain. The carelessness, the risk; she can feel the fury swell. How dare he do this to them again now, when things are so precarious? No point even saying it. But.

“You were talking to that man,” she says. “I saw you.”

He stops now too, turns back to her. “So?”

“He’s a maquisard.”

“I believe so.”

“I saw the way you were talking.”

“You’re jealous?”

“Name of God.”

“Maybe we were talking about the weather.”

She tsks. “You know nothing. You do not know this place. You have no idea.”

“He says I’ll do.”

“Do for what?”

He shrugs. “Whatever’s necessary.” He walks on.

She slumps with defeat. The night air is cool but she feels hot and unhappy and resentful and stuck, in the midst of all this mess, which has been piled so high around her that she cannot move a finger without risking more falling down on top of her. And he just keeps adding to the heap.

But then there’s something else — a prickle between the shoulder blades, like being watched, which makes her whip round and search the darkness. He stumbles on, but then notices she isn’t following.

“What?”

“Ssh.” She scans the scrubby trees, the hazy night.

“What’re you looking for?” He sways slightly, and rights himself. Even as she searches the darkness, she’s thinking, He is going to snore like a pig tonight. But then there’s another sound. So faint at first that it can’t really be heard.

“I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss—”

“Hush,” she says. “Shut up.”

A low thrum, which builds and grows, and becomes definite and insistent. And is unequivocal.

“Aeroplane.”

The noise is huge, it’s bursting.

“Christ—”

Moonlight kicks off Perspex and gleams on the grey blur of the blades. They duck down into the grass. Buffeted with gritty downdraught, crouched low, she can smell the earth, and her own body, and the booze off him, and the sweetness of the crushed grass, and the trail of exhaust coming down on them from a different world. Then the plane is past, and it roars away, and the noise diminishes.

They get back to their feet; she straightens out her skirt.

“Was that an Allied plane?”

“I think so,” he says.

By now the aeroplane is reduced to a thrum in the air and a dark blotch that shrinks against the stars.

“There must be a drop planned somewhere up the valley,” he says. He sounds almost sober now. Her throat constricts; she could cry. Really, if she just let herself, she could cry and cry and cry. Does he not see what a bloody slog all this has been? And now he’s going to throw it all up in the air again.

“For God’s sake, please,” she says. “Please. Just wait.”

She studies his face. The moonlight catching in his eyes. The starfished boy in tennis whites, the wounded man strapped down with hospital sheets. He was beautiful, he was brilliant, and he’d needed her. That’s what she’d thought. She had thought that it was love.

“Well,” she says. “That’s that, then.”

She wraps her arms around herself, turns away and stalks on. He follows. He could catch up with her in two paces if he wanted to. He could take her hand and slip her arm through his and, even now, he could comfort her. But what is there left to say? He is a disappointment to her; he’s a disappointment to himself. He just follows her on through the broken night.

—

He walks with Bonhomme silently, out along a back lane for a few twisting hairpinned miles; they slope off down a woodman’s track that takes them past piled logs and blasted clearings of sawn tree-stumps, mud and abandoned brushwood. They carry on until they’re deep into the woods, where the track ends dead. From here all he can see is an untrodden sweep of pine-needles and a maze of rusty trunks, and glancing back, there’s just the rutted gash that they’ve come along. On the left there is a coincidence of gaps between the branches and undergrowth, which might just be a path. At first the signs are equivocal — a bent-back twig here, a scuffed patch there — but as the ground rises the path becomes a worn line through fallen needles, and foot-polished patches on bare stone. As he heaves his way up the final rocky scramble, red stone catches the sun and glows like coals. The rock is skin-warm, crumbling, and as he climbs, it stains his hands red.

Bonhomme is bringing him to the maquis camp. It huddles on top of a bluff, deep amongst the trees. Faint smoke rises, but it is soon dissipated by the canopy. A lad nurses the fire, looks up warily; prone figures lie beneath a shelter of canvas and branches and do not move. Three bicycles lean together against a tree. The Boy Scouts, that’s what this is like. A summer camp set up in the woods.

Bonhomme nods to the kid at the fireside, who is smoky-faced and looks exhausted.

“We were on a job last night,” Bonhomme says. “The boys are tired.”

They head on, across the top of the bluff, which is a shallow cup scrubby and soft with fallen pine needles.

“If the Service de Travail Obligatoire doesn’t get the lads, they come to us; they can’t go home.”

He realizes he’s seen the kid before somewhere. Around the town, serving in one of the bars, perhaps. The farmer draws a scrubby bush aside. There’s a small, dry space behind, with crates stacked inside; he drags one out, cracks it open, lifts out a weapon.

“Ah yes, now,” Bonhomme says, “this is last night’s haul.”

He watches as deft hands twist the thing, click one part into another and offer the gun up to him.

“Here. Take it. It’s not loaded.”

It’s surprisingly light. He turns it round, looks at the gaping mouth where the magazine should go, at the grey barrel with its inner twist of mainspring; the stock is an empty metal frame. He tests the shift and clip of the safety catch. Even unloaded it’s an uneasy thing. It is cold, brutally simple.

“You have some experience of guns?”

“There was an Officer Training Corps at school, but I tended to stay away from all of that.”

“Shame. This is a Sten gun,” Bonhomme explains. “Ugly buggers, but they do their job. Except when they don’t. Sometimes they jam. Which is a fucking chore. Oh, and then there’s this…”

Bonhomme levers the lid off another box. A moment’s puzzlement in which it seems to be packed with fruit. Steely-green pineapples. The farmer lifts one, and it is a grenade, and he handles it as though it’s made of spun sugar.

“You pull the pin out,” he says. “You don’t hang around. You throw the thing. You have four seconds.”

He measures the time out, the beats of it in his head.

“Four seconds and no more, because then the other guy would have a chance to pick it up and lob it back at you. So — ” The farmer offers out the grenade; he looks at it. “Take.”

He lifts it in wary fingertips.

“Don’t worry,” the farmer says. “We’ve taken proper care of them; you can see they’re not degraded. They’re quite safe until you pull the pin.”

He looks at him in disbelief. “We’re going to throw it?”

“No. You’re going to throw it.”

“Isn’t that a waste?”

“The first time you do this, you don’t want it to matter too much.”

—

The firing range is off away from the camp and the store, down a separate gully leading off to the east, the steep sides acting as a natural buffer to noise. He sets the grenade down like an egg before attempting anything with the gun. Bonhomme demonstrates the shift and click that sets the Sten to semi-automatic. He takes the cold thing in his hands, and when he aims and squeezes the trigger a green glass bottle throws itself up into sudden fragments in the air. The noise is hard, the gun bucks in his grip and its heel knocks against his shoulder. It is nasty and efficient.

He hands the Sten back to Bonhomme. He looks down at the grenade, then crouches to lift it. He holds it like a cricket ball, just near his hip, his fingers curled around it.

The grenade is heavy.

After a moment, Bonhomme says, “You don’t have to do it, you know.”

He feels the hatched lines against his sweating palm, the coldness of the metal case. The thing is so self-contained; its hugeness presses out against itself. It’s as full of violence as an egg is full of egg.

“You don’t have to do any of this, you know.”

“One pulls the pin, and then, four seconds?”

“That’s right.”

“What — over there?” Towards a fall of scree from the cliff face, where a scrubby juniper twists out from between the stones.

“See that bush? Imagine it’s got a machine gun.”

His lips twist. He hefts the grenade in his sweating palm, turns abruptly and walks away.

Bonhomme frowns after him. “What?”

“I’ll need a run-up.”

He fights the urge to rub the grenade against his trouser-leg. He turns back and fixes his eye on the shrub, and then he goes to pull the pin and fumbles it, hands shaking. It’s out. He runs; three long strides, tick, swings his hand up and bowls the grenade out, tick, into the air, tick. He stands, watching, as the grenade spins towards the juniper. As though these were the nets at Portora, or summer cricket fields at Trinity.

He glances round for Bonhomme, but the farmer is just dust and scuffing feet, already gone.

Oh, yes. That.

He has made five big strides when there is an almighty whumpf and a thump of solid air hits his back and propels him on. He collides into Bonhomme and they stumble together, come to a halt. They look back. The air blooms with red dust and a shower of rock and grit falls back to the earth. Sound comes blanketed, and a thin ringing pierces through it.

“I should have said—” Bonhomme yells over their deafness. “If you can manage it, it’s a good idea to cover your ears.”

—

He is taken another way back — along the far side of the bluff and down a dry gully that in winter would be a foaming stream. Their feet clatter over sharp-edged rocks.

“For now, we’ll need you to take care of some shipments and conceal some items for us. At the moment we are preparing ourselves, getting things in place.”

He nods.

“But when combat operations start,” Bonhomme says, “you report immediately to camp. Don’t wait around for someone to come and get you, we will need to get to work.”

“How will I know?”

“Do you know Verlaine?”

“Some.”

“ ‘The Song of Autumn.’ ”

“I know it.”

“There will be a quotation, in the messages on Radio Londres. When you hear that, you come and find us. You use the password Violins.”

“Verlaine,” he says. “Violins.”

“And La Victoire.”

He rubs his arms.

They reach a footbridge; it cuts across the gully at head height. The ground falls away and there are roofs below, a fence.

“I’ll turn back here,” Bonhomme says, his voice dropped low. “You go up and on; the path will take you to the road. You should know your way back from there.”

They shake hands. He clambers up the bank. At the top he glances round to fix the route in his mind: the footbridge, that sloping tree. Bonhomme has gone; there’s a flicker of movement higher up, and that is that.

He turns and heads downhill, following a faint path that gets more definite as it descends. He comes to the dwellings, skirts the side of a garden. There’s a gate, and then a lane, and he follows the lane, keeping to the verge, feeling dizzy and conspicuous with it all, like having written, when the writing’s going well, or maybe like falling in love.

Those gnomic messages on Radio Londres, carrying their invisible bundles of meaning: one of them will now be addressed to him. A line from a poem that will mean something entirely other than what it means.

At the end of the lane, he finds himself standing on the edge of the main route to Apt. He’s only a quarter of a mile or so from home. He stuffs his hands into his pockets, finds his sucking stone and slips it into his mouth. He turns along the road and walks on through the twilight.

—

Between the coppiced willows, down on their hunkers in the low-growing foliage, they keep out of sight. From the crossroads, one track heads off Roman-straight along the valley floor; the other is a sinuous white line that weaves its way down from the hills behind them and up into the far mountains ahead. There’s no settlement at the crossroads, no signpost, nothing but a triangle of woodland, and then open pasture, vineyard, and an owl that goes ghosting past, then settles on a branch, and then flutters off again.

They are waiting to make a pick-up. But no one comes.

They have walked for miles — eight or nine by the time taken and the lick they took it at — out through the pastures and the vineyards beyond Roussillon. At first, it seemed that they were heading for Cavaillon. He followed the other fellow’s steady countryman’s stride along footpaths and down field margins and farm tracks; there were sudden turns in the darkness, loops to avoid farmsteads where dogs stirred in their kennels, clinking their chains. They climbed fences and ducked through holes in hedges. And soon he was not certain that it was Cavaillon that they were heading for after all. There were no road signs, no milestones to go by, and no landmarks that he could make stick: he thought he recognized a broken tree, a barn, but then as they passed the angle changed and the shapes seemed different, and he no longer felt sure of anything at all.

So that now, huddled in the darkness, the terrain keeps morphing around him, swelling, shrinking, swooping sideways, making different shapes out of itself as he tries to situate himself within it. It’s dizzying.

The other fellow, though, seems confident they are in the right place. He seems certain-sure.

“We’re early.” A battered tin water-flask is swished in front of his face. “You go faster than I thought you would.”

He takes the bottle and swigs, expects water, gets brandy, coughs; he takes another drink and then returns the flask.

At midnight, by a distant chime, a cart rumbles down the road towards them, coming down from the hills. It’s carrying no light. The other fellow gets to his feet; he follows, his knees cracking. They clamber up the bank out of the woods and on to the road. The dark shape rolls on towards them.

But then something changes. He catches sight of the other fellow’s profile — the angled cheekbones, the narrowed eyes — and wonders how he can see that much all of a sudden, and where the light is coming from. He glances round. And then, Christ, there are headlamps coming in a stream along a road further off down the valley. The low, yellowed, half-blindfolded headlamps of military vehicles in blackout. He counts three sets as they bump and weave and slide round bends. He knocks his knuckles into the other fellow’s arm, jerks his hand in that direction.

“Brothel of shit.”

The cart is there; the cart is loaded with air-dropped supplies, they should not be out at this time, they’re all implicated and it’s all too late. The carter scrambles down from his seat: he’s a little skinny man, just bone and wrinkles. “Quick!”

And then it is all ham-handed fumbling and it is so slow, there is a watery clarity in which images hang suspended: the carter’s deep-lined temple as he squints down at a buckle, fumbling with it; the silvery muzzle of the donkey, its coffee-dark eye; the raised grain of weathered boards in cold pink hands.

Between them, they manage to roll the cart off the edge of the road and then slither it down the bank into the copse. They heave the wheels over roots, grate through narrow places between trunks. It’s become a monster of a thing, lumbering and recalcitrant. The convoy has turned along the valley floor now. Is heading dead towards them.

“Careful!” hisses the carter. He is struggling with the donkey.

They ease the cart-bed down; the crates slide and clunk together.

The donkey brays and pulls against its halter. The carter curses, drags, brings the donkey stumbling after him and into the edge of the woods.

The other fellow’s back up on the road, scuffing out tracks, ruffling up the wayside grass.

That sickening rattle of diesel engines. The carter’s face is a skull in the shadows: he is dragging at the donkey’s halter; she stands splay-legged, head low, unshifting. The other fellow grabs the donkey’s halter, wraps an arm around her neck and heaves her over. She drops, collapsing, and he falls with her. She struggles, and he shifts his weight, and she lies still.

“Hey!” the carter says. “What are you doing?”

“Get down.”

The narrow flickering lights are here. Cheek on mulch, an arm over his head, he feels his chest press against the ground with each breath.

The light races over them. The trees are suddenly green. Headlamps ripple over trunks, silhouette the grasses, make wickerwork of the branches and twigs. The ground shakes. The air is full of noise. Light strokes across the donkey’s flank. He sees a blue sleeve, a red scarf, a curve of balding moleskin and the grey haze of hand-sharpened steel. He knows that type of knife. It’s a vineyard pruning blade. If the donkey struggles up, he’ll cut her throat.

Grit sprays sideways from underneath the peeling tyres. He closes his eyes; he turns his face aside. The noise of the trucks is massive. Lights flash across his closed lids in red striations. And then the noise is fading, and the trucks are gone, and it is over.

He opens his eyes and watches the red tail-lights of the final vehicle. Time ticks on and the lights diminish. And that’s it. It turns out that they go on living after this.

“You are a right bastard,” the carter’s saying.

The other fellow straightens himself out. The donkey stumbles upright too, unfolding like a card-table. She shakes out her stubby mane and stumbles away a few paces, and stands there with her back to them and craps on to the woodland floor. The blade is closed and slipped away.

“Who’d have pulled my fucking cart? I’d be ruined.” The carter’s dusting off his trousers.

The other fellow just looks out after the vehicles. “Heading north,” he says, frowning, speculative. The lights shrink, and the darkness swells and closes over them, soft as ink.

The carter, muttering, goes off to retrieve and console the donkey. The other fellow turns to the cart.

He follows. He wipes his face. He notices that his hands are shaking.

“All right, then,” the other fellow says. “Let’s get our explosives and get out of here.”

—

The carter rolls away, muttering curses. They pick their way through the trees, the crate slung between them as they walk. It is heavy. But it’s differently heavy to, say, bricks or apples or flour. Out in the fields now, and the moon is up; the countryside is blue and beautiful. But all he can look at is the crate, as it swings there just in front of him like a little coffin.

It could blow them both sky-high. It could blow them into bloody rain. It is a giddy feeling, vertiginous.

Back at the little house, they stow the crate in the dark hallway. It’ll do there till morning, when he’ll find somewhere better for it. He wipes his hands down his trousers. The other fellow slopes off into the dark; he closes the door on the strangeness of the night.

Indoors, it is as much as he can do to pull off his boots. In stockinged feet he climbs the stairs as though they are a mountainside. He falls into bed. She stirs and half wakes.

“Where have you been?”

“Go back to sleep.”

“Where have you been, though?”

“Nowhere.”

“Tsk.”

“No, really. I don’t know.”

She turns on her side, drops back into sleep. He lies on his back, looking up into the darkness as it fades to morning.

—

Suzanne has been growing geraniums in pots. Miss Beamish gave her the cuttings. The flowers are wafer white, blood-clot red and blister pink — they spread their leaves like magician’s hands and are taking over the terrace. So he lifts a pot and sets it gently down on top of the crate, and slides another couple of plants in front of it too. He steps back to consider the effect, his back pressed against the railing. It’s still quite clearly and obviously a crate; there’s no escaping that. The question is, does it appear to be a benign and innocent empty old crate, the kind of crate on which one might arrange a pleasing display of potted plants, or does it still, geraniums or no geraniums, appear to be what it indeed is — a crate replete with violence, a crate stuffed tight with enormity, chock full of the potential to blow them in all directions at once?

He tilts his head. Considers it. The latter, he decides.

But then it would, because he knows.

From indoors a child’s voice sings out her scales, the notes clear and piercing. She has a good singing voice, the kid from the quincaillerie, the kind of pure voice that brings goosebumps to your arms. She’d have to leave if she wanted to do anything about it. And where would you go now? Paris? Berlin? London?

It’s a pain that Suzanne can’t take the lessons up at Saint-Michel, where there is a piano. But Yvonne can’t stand the coming and the going any more. Her nerves are shot.

He shuffles another pot along with a foot, then crouches down to tease out the leaves.

“What are you doing?” Suzanne squints out at him through the terrace doors, and then at the flowerpots and the new, conspicuous crate. “What’s going on?” Left unsupervised, the child’s voice lingers on a note, and then drops, and halts. “Are you gardening?”

“No.”

She steps through and closes the glass door behind her, so that she is outside with him on the terrace. Down on the street below, an old woman with a headscarf and basket stares up at them. Suzanne raises a hand. The woman is obliged to return the wave and walk on. Then Suzanne turns back to him, and her smile is gone.

“Don’t give me any of your old slush. What’s in the box?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Anyway, it won’t be here for long.”

“If it’s nothing, why does it need to be here at all?”

“I was going to put it under the bed, but I thought you wouldn’t like that.”

“Why?”

“Look, don’t worry about it. It’ll be fine. It’s only for a few days.”

“I didn’t ask how long it’s staying. I asked you what it is, and why it’s on our terrace.”

“It has to be kept safe and dry.”

Suzanne’s face freezes. The girl’s head appears between the curtains. Suzanne waves her furiously back: the child drops the fabric, disappears.

“Name of God—” She speaks low, furious, her eyes narrow and hard. “You don’t have the sense that you were born with, do you? What’s in the box?”

“They needed somewhere to store it.”

“Do you even know?”

Then Henri swings into view, coming back into town from his lesson with Miss Beamish. Suzanne turns away to hide her fury, but does not leave, while he raises a hand in greeting and Henri stops in the street and they lob words up and down between them. She stays put, arms folded, and waits it out. Henri ambles off with a wave and a cheery promise of drinks.

“You’re not leaving it here,” she says, as soon as Henri’s gone.

Down at the end of the garden, there’s a hollow in the bank, almost a cave. He can’t keep such a close eye on the crate there, but it’s well out of the way, and it’s dry. He bends to shift the potted plants aside. He lifts the crate and staggers sideways past her, back into the house.

“Just coming through,” he says, to her outraged glare.

The child stands, big-eyed and silent, uncomprehending, her fingers spread on the edge of the tabletop. He raises his eyebrows at her. Suzanne snaps, “Carry on!” and chivvies him towards the back door. She opens it for him. The child opens her lips and fills her lungs and climbs her way up the scale again.

He goes through the doorway gingerly. She speaks in English, because of the child. Suzanne’s English is limited and brittle; it can’t last for long.

“What, after all, is in the box?” she asks.

The English word is too close to the French, so he says it quietly. “Explosives. Sorry.”

Suzanne’s eyes widen; her lips part.

“I think the mouldable kind,” he adds, more generally. “They make these sausage things out of them. Charges.”

Suzanne sucks in a long preparatory breath. He slips out into the garden before she can actually explode.

—

Suzanne feels for the pins in her hair, but the other Suzanne, Miss Beamish’s Suzanne, is reaching for them too, and their hands brush together, and Suzanne lets hers drop and leaves the other woman to remove the hairpins for her with her almond fingertips. The deftness is soothing; the pins’ release eases the pressure from the back of her head, like a problem that just disappears. The hair falls in a coil down her back and the other Suzanne teases it loose. She lets a breath go with it and her shoulders soften.

“I hadn’t realized how long it had grown,” she says.

The other Suzanne just smiles and tucks a towel around her collar; she gestures her over to the sink.

Leaning in over the stone basin, the stale smell of unwashed hair around her, she feels the stove-warmed water eased on to her scalp, feels the other woman’s hand guide the wet into her hair and soften it, slowing the water’s fall so that it is not wasted.

“Good?”

“Yes, thank you.”

There is a rummaging as the lid is removed from a pot and a handful of soapflakes scooped out. A shallow palm is cupped low for Suzanne to catch the scent.

“Lavender,” she says at the unexpected pleasure.

“Mm.”

The other Suzanne takes the hand away and shares the flakes between her two palms, and rubs them into foam. She strokes this on to and then massages it into Suzanne’s wet hair.

Bent over the stone basin, tendrils hanging down around her face, she feels the other woman’s fingers tease; they tweak at knots, scrape lightly across the scalp, eliciting both discomfort and pleasure. A tingling exposure at the back of the neck, where a run of water escapes. She thinks of what else these hands will do, these fingertips; where also they will brush and tease. The other’s body is just beside her own, the feel of her breath, her own hip pressing against the other’s thigh, and the other woman’s breast touching, soft, against Suzanne’s shoulder. It occurs to her that the other Suzanne is not wearing a brassiere, and her thoughts slide and become warm.

I am hungry for this, Suzanne thinks, as she is guided upright, her hair gently towelled, as she is brought back to the chair and settled there, vulnerable and tousled as a baby bird. I am just starving.

Through the window comes the hush of the cypresses, and the birds singing, and the other Suzanne moves round her, combing out the tangles, her breath on Suzanne’s ear, on her bare arm, on the washed-thin fabric of her blouse. Suzanne’s head moves with the insistence of the comb, leaning this way and then that. The hair is tugged out straight in a curtain round her. She closes her eyes as the other Suzanne begins to cut.

Against the summer sun her eyelids glow red. There is just the other woman’s breath and warmth, and the snip of blades through the curtaining hair, and the sounds of the trees and birds from outside, and voices further off in the street. Suzanne opens her eyes and sees the halo of her own fallen hair lying on the tiled floor. The other Suzanne moves round in front of her and leans in close; she parts the hair in front of Suzanne’s face and gives her a smile. Three deft strokes of a comb and then, “I think you’ll do,” she says.

Suzanne returns the smile. They are like that for a moment, face to face, smile to smile, the other woman’s lips mushroom-soft, and then she says “Well…” as she turns away and bustles at the dresser, chinking glasses. A little laugh over her shoulder. “I’m afraid we’re just out of setting lotion.”

She pours wine, and Suzanne turns her head from side to side, feeling the coolness and the lightness, brushing the new-cut ends with her fingers, her own body feeling soft and light and warm, and she is, briefly, relaxed and happy. Then Anna comes in from the garden, with those snuffling little dogs around her feet.

“Oh yes,” Anna says. “Very nice.” And she takes a glass of wine from the other Suzanne. “Very nice indeed.”

There is an ease between the two of them, the casual press of hip against hip, of warm soft flesh against warm soft flesh. They fit together, and it makes her ache.

“Thank you,” Suzanne says. “It feels very nice.”

The other Suzanne hands her a tumbler, but her focus is on Anna now, as it should be. Suzanne takes a sip of wine. What she has felt — this warmth, this softening — it is the gratitude of a stray dog for a casual kindness, a knuckling of the ears, a morsel.

What she wants more than anything is just an arm around her. This easy come-and-go. A kiss.

“Well,” she says, and takes a sip of the wine and sets the glass aside. “That was most kind of you.” She gets up to go. “Very kind indeed.”

—

A soft knock at the back door that evening just as they’re thinking about going to bed. He’s up and going to answer it before she can respond. The men are in their working blues and battered tweeds, dressed to go unseen in the twilight. Two more appear out of the darkness, pushing bicycles, which tick along comfortably, then stop.

“Have you got our gear?”

“This way.”

They pick their way down towards the hiding place. The evening is loud with cicadas. He crouches to get inside and hauls out the crate. He dusts his hands, while others move in to lift the load.

“Any news?” he asks.

A shaken head, pursed lips. “Just wait,” someone says. “Listen out. It can’t be long now.”

—

Anna Beamish bunches up by the radio and twists the dial with the concentration of a safe-cracker, squinting with effort; there’s a fug of interference and then a wince-inducing screech.

It is the fag-end of a blazing June day. There are wine bottles standing round the room; cigarette smoke drifts in skeins. He should not be drinking, not really, not now that things are so imminent, but things could go on being imminent indefinitely, and he faces what is coming more with dread than anticipation. Things will have to be done. It’s an uneasy thought. And it is so much easier to drink than not to drink, so his head is already swimming with rough wine when Beethoven’s Fifth throbs through the static and the noise and distortion flung at it by the German transmitters in their attempt to block the signal. He is straining for the music out of hunger for it, through the radio-fuzz and his own furred senses. For the Morse-like patterns of the notes. Da da da dum. It brings a tingle to the back of the neck. That’s V, isn’t it? In Morse code. That’s V.

This is London; the French speaking to the French.

Henri and Josette Hayden listen, heads bent. Suzanne sits in silence too. She had been giving him looks every time his glass was refilled. She wants to go home, but he has been ignoring her because they do not have a radio set at home, and either she has given up on the looks or the more he drinks the better he gets at not noticing.

Before we begin, please listen to some personal messages.

Anna Beamish perches on the arm of a chair; her Suzanne leans in against her, her dark head resting softly on Anna’s flank. Around them, the strange utterances slip and drift, unresolvable and haunting.

It is hot in Suez.

One of the dogs butts her head into his hanging hand, and he runs his palm over her fuzzy round skull and then knuckles at her cheek.

The dice are on the table.

The dog drops to the floor and rolls on her back; he can’t reach her there without moving and he can’t bring himself to move.

Jean has a long moustache.

The dog stretches luxuriously, oblivious, and makes little happy groaning sounds. Outside, beyond the window, cicadas buzz.

Wound my heart with a monotonous languor.

And that’s it. His fingers dig into the upholstery. That is the line from Verlaine. That’s the message to the maquis that they are to begin combat operations. His skin bristles. Now it comes: the chaos of splintered timber and shattered brick and bursting shells and bullets and dust and blood and broken bodies. Liberation.

He finds that he’s on his feet, and that everyone is staring at him.

Suzanne looks up, her face grey.

His heart races. This is hope, he realizes, and it’s horrible. He sinks back into his seat. Hope implies the wire peeled back, and revelation: the crows in the woods, the fowls in the coop, the gamekeepers with their guns and chopping block — what they all will have become. The words continue from the radio, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His seat creaks, and the dog gets up and nudges her muzzle into his hand again, and he strokes her.

The broadcast over, Anna Beamish crosses to the radio set and turns it off, and the room falls entirely silent.

Then Anna says, “Well, that was illuminating.”

She lifts a bottle, ambles round, sloshes wine into glasses.

“So are you at liberty to tell us what that was all about, then, old top?”

“Hm?”

“What your keen ear detected there?”

Josette and Henri are looking towards him still, as is the other Suzanne. His Suzanne, though, is studying her shoes.

“Oh, nothing,” he says. “Nothing much at all.”

One of the dogs starts to whine, and there’s another sound beyond that. It takes a moment to notice, and, having noticed, to make sense of what they’re hearing. It’s an aeroplane — not close this time, way off across the valley. The engine noise gets louder, and then it begins to fade, without ever having got properly close at all.

“It’s like Piccadilly Circus round here,” says Henri, and Anna beams at him, proud of the vernacular.

“Well then,” Anna says. “We’ll drink to nothing, and wish you all the best of nothing, and swift success with nothing much at all.”

She raises her glass, her lips already stained with wine.

He drains his drink. He sets the glass down. Then he turns to Henri and Josette. “Could Suzanne come and stay with you for a few days?”

Suzanne speaks quietly, after their kind offers of hospitality. “Why would I go and stay anywhere?”

“You’d be very welcome here.” Anna leans in a little blearily, touches her knee. “We do have plenty of room.”

“Thank you, but I am quite all right at home.”

He says, “I don’t want to leave you on your own.”

She looks at him, finally. “Then don’t.”

—

A walk out through the gorgeous June night, out along the Apt road, his hastily packed bag hanging at his hip. Cigarettes, a box of matches, a notebook, a pencil and his fingerless gloves. He could probably have packed rather better for war: on reflection, these things do not seem to be particularly martial. He takes the lane that leads up across the hillside and fades to the path that skirts the dark house and garden. He reaches the gully and slithers in, barking an ankle on a rock. Blundering up the dry bed, he clatters over stones, lurching along, arms outstretched. It’s darker under the trees and the night see-saws around him. His head is not, perhaps, quite as clear as he had thought it.

He is stopped well before he reaches the camp, before he even reaches the bottom of the bluff, by a voice.

“Qui vive?”

“Violins?” he tries.

A shape steps forward from the side of a pine trunk. It’s the boy from the camp.

“I thought it would be you,” the boy says. “You sound like a herd of elephants. Keep the noise down, eh?”

Chastened, he passes by, catching the outdoor musk of campfire and unwashed body. He treads softly. And this, after all, is what must be done, so that the boy can get on one of those bikes and cycle home to his mammy and be a boy again, as though all of this was just a summer’s camp, a nonsense, and not a thing of life and death at all. And that too is hope.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN THE VAUCLUSE, Summer 1944

The crackling codes are conjured out of darkness by Bonhomme’s radio set, which he rigs up in someone’s attic or the back of a barn or workshop, or up amongst the trees, draping his aerial over the tiles or branches, and then packing it all away briskly and moving on.

The cell sets about making these words flesh.

Allied forces have landed in Normandy. This appears to be a truth. Not even the collaborationist papers and radio deny it. But, still, it is half a world away.

They walk the long country paths and the quiet roads at night. In June it never seems to be fully dark. They divide up ammunition and explosives, dig caches for their own gear, in the woods and in field margins and by the edge of the valley road. They lug the rest to the hidden camps across the countryside, to the forest clearings and exhausted quarries and caves high on the mountainside, where the lean men wait for them and nod approvingly over the new supplies.

There are supplies too for the thin, dark wives, the hungry children, the hard old folk. The families that the men have left behind.

The Allied forces land near Fréjus. It is not half a world away; it is a few hours’ drive from here.

Out in the field, everything becomes vivid, vital. He is ravenous at the offer of food, falls down dead and sleeps when provided with a bed or an approximation of a bed. He’ll sleep till the sun’s shining right on his face or someone shakes him awake. Then he pulls on his wrecked boots over his stinking socks and clambers out of whatever shelter it had been, at whatever time of night or day, and gets on with whatever he is required to do.

Because life is happening here, now, conspicuously, in the farmsteads and barns and in the woods and fields and gullies. The grass stretches itself towards the sun; vine tendrils curl themselves around their supports. Gunfire clatters. The birds are outraged at each other. Cows breathe sweetness, drip milk; lambs quiver and leap; and one lamb lolls, limp, head staved in and oozing. It roasts over the woodland fire and then is jointed into equal shares, its flesh fatty in the fingers and on the lips, becoming a darkness in the belly, and nausea. Heads start up at a hollow boom, and then another and another echoing out through the night. These are charges they supplied, dished out to another cell who are blowing up the railway line. They’re sending it sky-high.

Hope. He’s sick of it. Sick to the stomach of it. The wire is snipped though, bit by bit.

—

In the kitchen of the empty little house, he drinks water, cup after cup, poured from the sweating earthenware pitcher. In the jug it seems black as ink, but when he pours it it catches the light and twines and glimmers.

Through the night comes the distant sound of bombardment. And over to the south, the sky glows.

He finds a dry end of bread, dips a bit into his cup and gnaws at it awkwardly, trying to avoid the worst teeth, the ones that ache, the ones that sting, the one that now rocks in its socket. Outside, trucks go by, their low blackout headlamps skimming through the little room, their engines rattling.

He ducks down, out of the line of the window.

When he takes off his boots they have dried as stiff as wood. His socks stick to his skin. He knows he stinks. Sometimes he catches the smell of himself and it is raw and animal. Barefoot, footsore, he climbs the stairs to his empty bedroom and lies down on top of the covers. A slow blink. He is alone. A clattering of gunfire somewhere in the distance. A slow blink. His knees ache. His feet ache. Muscle softens against the mattress. A slow blink, and the lids flutter but do not lift. And the satisfaction of useful work, for once, undertaken; of something under way.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LA CROIX, 1944

Miss Beamish’s dogs, locked up in the scullery, are barking fit to wake the dead. But it wasn’t the dogs that alerted him to the soldiers’ presence. It was the gunshots.

The first shots jolted him out of sleep; the second burst made him register what had smashed his sleep apart. They seemed close, but the way that the sound would bounce around the valleys, bluffs and outcrops here made it hard to tell what direction they had come from. Sten gun, he’d have laid money on it, set on automatic: somebody was making very free with their ammunition. He reached out for Suzanne, but Suzanne wasn’t there; of course, she was staying with Josette and Henri, so he just lay sweating, alert, listening to the birds cawing to the sky and the empty echoes down the valley, waiting for whatever happened next.

Nothing happened next.

So he got up, crossed to the window and opened the shutters. In the pre-dawn blue, there was just the pale road and the dark trees and the burnt-paper scraps of birds settling back into their roosts, so he closed the shutters and pulled on his shirt and trousers.

He was downstairs when the milk cart rattled past the front of the house, going at an unusually brisk trot. He trod into his boots, drew the bolts and headed out into the lane. He glanced in both directions, but there was nothing going on, so he went a little way into town at a tired amble, keeping to the shadowy edge of the lane beside the sprawling wild roses, under pollarded limes. The dash of a rat made him jump, but that was that.

The town itself was peaceful: just the early-morning unshuttering of shops, the bakery glowing, the scent of bread making his stomach clutch. So he turned back and headed the other way, out of town, passing the front of the little house and on towards Anna Beamish’s, and still there was nothing to be seen in the raising light but the dusty road and the trees and the dry grass and the snails trailing their way across the verges and weighing down the stems. Back to bed, then, if nothing’s doing. But then a farm cart came trundling round the corner, down past the side of Anna’s place, and the horse jibbed and sidestepped, and it was all the driver could do to keep the old cob steady, and they clattered on past him, and the driver had his gaze fixed dead ahead and didn’t even nod.

And that was when he peered along the lane and saw the soldiers.

They were a grey heap up against Anna’s fence, but he brought himself to move towards it. Then there was the smell of blood. He stared down at stockinged feet, a hand curled in the dust, the dark inside of a fallen-open mouth. Skin was pale blue; blood was black; a button, though, caught the morning light and glittered.

He stands now, and he looks, and his tongue presses against the back of his teeth, and a tooth gives, and it hurts, and he stands, and he looks, and he stands, and he looks, and the dogs are barking.

And then someone comes out of Anna’s house. He hears the door go. The dogs come tumbling with her, beside themselves. The door falls shut.

“Is it yourself?” she calls.

He nods. His gorge rises. They are in trouble now.

She comes striding down the path towards him, the dogs barking and twining around her ankles; she’s knotting the cord of a tartan dressing gown.

“For God’s sake, whisht,” she says, and scoops up one of the creatures and holds it to her.

“We heard,” she says. “But we thought it best to stay inside. One thinks one should telephone to someone. But who does one telephone these days?”

“There are two—” The words stick in his throat; they have hooks. He turns back to look at the heap. “Bodies.”

“Definitely dead?” She peers over the gate; her question’s answered. She puts the dog down again and slips out to join him, leaving the creatures there to yap and whine. “Damn damn damn damn damn.”

She frowns, scans up and down the road. Death itself has become contagious; they could catch it here themselves. “We’ll have to do something.”

“Call the priest?” he suggests.

“If they get taken into town, the whole place would be implicated.”

They stand in silence.

“We came through a town,” he says, “where there’d been reprisals.” The woman with the frozen eyes. The man with a hole in his cheek, his jaw on show.

“We can’t just leave them lying here,” Miss Beamish says.

“No.”

She becomes brisk. She’s off back through her gate, yelling at the dogs, striding up the path, while he stands there with the dead. Up at the house, the other Suzanne is trying to get the dogs indoors. Voices are raised over their barking: What is it? Oh Good God, what are we going to do? He looks at a foot, the hole where a toenail has scythed right through the wool. The soldier’s gaiters are lying loose on the dust nearby. The killers took the boots.

It’s early yet. The road is quiet. Few people pass this way. They might get away with it.

Anna rejoins him. She has thrown on slacks and a polo-shirt and brings two garden spades, sloped together over a shoulder. She has also brought a bottle.

“My pal suggested this.” The bottle is lifted for inspection. Brandy.

“She is very wise.”

“She is. She really is.”

They consider the men. Slavic, high-boned faces, one softer than the other, younger, with a scattering of freckles like a pancake. The eyes are open and they’re grey, and the corneas are creasing as they dry, and the flies gather to sip away the wet. The Armée de l’Est, serving here, were recruited from conquered countries; they were prisoners of war.

“State of them, poor lads.”

She hands him the bottle. He uncorks it, swigs brandy, hands the bottle back.

“Where’ll we…”

They glance around.

“Over there,” she says with a nod. There, the verge is wider. Wide enough for a grave.

They go past the bodies.

“Russians, do you suppose they are?” he asks.

“Could be. Could be Poles. Took their chances, didn’t they? Either this or a labour camp. You can see why.”

The other is darker and seems a little older than his companion, a little harder-looking. Sunburned.

Anna turns her face away. He follows her on to the wider scruffy margin before the trees. He wants to say something consoling, something useful. There is nothing consoling or useful to say.

Her voice is dry; he hears her swallow. “Here?”

“Here’s as good as anywhere,” he says.

They shunt their spades into the ground. They begin to dig.

—

It takes a long time to dig a grave. As the diggers sink lower into the earth, the inner surface grows blood-red, damp, veinous. Paler rusty topsoil trickles down inside. He turns his sucking stone over in his mouth, tucks it down alongside his back teeth; the nerves sing like wires.

After an hour or so, Anna clambers out, careless of her clothes, and goes back to the house. No one passes; no one comes to investigate the gunshots in the night. He is grateful for the isolation of their little houses, for the self-preservation that is keeping their few neighbours at a distance.

When Anna returns, the other Suzanne comes with her, frowning, worried, carrying two bottles of beer and a biscuit tin. They drink the beer and eat in silence, squatting in the dust. The other Suzanne offers to help with the digging, but there is no room really for another in the grave, so they wave her away; also, the fewer people tainted by association, the better. They swig more brandy, swipe at flies, and get back to their work.

They dig as the sun climbs into the sky and the heat grows, and the flies buzz loud and the smell gets worse. He runs with sweat.

“That’ll do,” she says, breathless. “Won’t it?”

They climb out.

He turns his face aside as he hauls the boy up by the armpits. He is much heavier than he looks. Flies buzz around him, but he no longer has a free hand to swat them away. Anna huffs down to grab the feet, and between them they lug him over to the edge of the pit. They lay him down beside it.

“How do we do this?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Swing him in or roll him?”

Neither seems appropriate. They do not move.

“Right.” She bends to grab the feet again. “Come on.”

He just stands there.

“What?”

“I don’t like it.”

“No. I know. I don’t either.”

He hunkers down. They grab handfuls of grey-green serge, drag on limbs, heave and push. The body thumps over on to its side; a hand dangles in. They shove again; there’s a fall of dirt and the body tumbles and scuffs down the side of the pit. It lands awkwardly at an angle, feet higher than the head. The sides of the grave are too oblique, the base not flat enough for dignity; the boy’s neck twists back and he is profiled on the dirt.

The two of them straighten up. He’s about to wipe his mouth, but then lets his arm fall, shakes out unclean hands and wipes them one against the other.

“We’ve made a poor show of this,” he says.

“We haven’t much experience,” she says.

“I’ve only buried dogs before.”

“It’s not the same, is it?”

“No.”

They stand, looking down at the body in the pit.

“There’s the other fellow.”

They turn and go back, and lift him too.

By midday, the bodies are swallowed up and gone. All that’s to be seen is a darker patch on the pale earth, and that is drying out in the sun. They should not be left here. They should not rot into this red earth. Theirs should be the black tilth of home, years from now, decades on. Half a century or more, they could have had. They could have seen the next millennium in, if this century had not turned out to be the shambles that it is.

He wipes his face with his handkerchief and it comes away smeared with red. Anna’s grey Aertex shirt is powdered with red dust and patched with sweat; the sweat and dust make a red mask of her face. She sinks down on the edge of the road and just sits there in the dust. Her head hangs. He folds himself down beside her. He hands her the brandy.

“I’m too thirsty for brandy.” She uncorks the bottle, drinks anyway. “That was a bad thing we did there.”

He nods.

“I feel disgusting.”

“I do too.”

Anna raises the bottle. “To the end of all of this whorehouse mess,” she says. “To the end of this heap of fecking bollocks, this pile of whorish shit, because I have had my fill and more of it, so I have.”

The bundling forth of French and Irish swearing makes him smile, despite himself. She takes another slug of brandy. She goes to wipe the bottleneck, then, having nothing clean on her, not even an inch of sleeve, just hands it over as it is.

“To the end,” he says, and lifts the bottle, and the brandy burns and warms, and seems for a while to help.

—

That evening he has barely drifted into sleep before he’s jerked out of it like a fish on a hook. A whistle in the street. He slips out of bed, leaves Suzanne sleeping. Her lashes long, her hair tumbled and damp. He hadn’t known — or if he had, he had not remembered — that she would be there. Does it mean something that she is there?

From the window he can see a large group of maquis waiting in the street.

Someone yells up: “The sons of whores are on the run! Come on down. We’re to give ’em what for.”

He grabs clothes and boots, runs downstairs to join them. They march down the middle of the road in the blue evening; they talk, they laugh, they make themselves conspicuous. What, after all, do they have to hide? The balance of the world is shifting; everything is sliding and shivering and settling into different patterns once again. This is their land, this is their home; their noisy footfalls are reclaiming it. He finds himself watching their feet as they plant them on the grit; he watches the slow circle of the cycling boys’ legs and he cannot partake of their joy, their comfort, their sense of ease. He is looking out for German low boots on a farmhand’s feet.

The group clumps along the cart tracks; they pick up others at crossroads, they call at cottages; the crowd grows. They descend towards the main road along the valley floor, where an arms cache has already been dug. They drag away bushes; they unpack the wares, divvy up ammunition, pace out the gaps between charges and lay them. Bonhomme hands him a cold Sten and he hefts it in his grip and recalls the green wine bottle flinging itself in fragments up into the air.

Somebody is dishing out hand grenades. One is placed in his palm like an apple. He puts it in his pocket. It weighs his jacket down, makes it droop.

From the south comes the thud of shells, and distant gunfire. Aeroplanes grind invisibly across the sky. The Armée de l’Est is expected to retreat this way. It has tanks and trucks and artillery and an urgent need to be elsewhere. The maquisards have a few charges, a few rifles and a hand grenade each. They have their own self-righteous outrage to compel them: la patrie, le terroir, la revanche. He can feel none of this. We are fleas on a dog’s back, he thinks; the most we’ll do is make it stop and scratch.

He lays the rifle down beside him on the bank and it catches a guilty sheen of the half-light. The hand grenade lies cold against his thigh. His own blood throbs next to it. He supposes he will throw the thing, if he is obliged to. He is not certain that he can bring himself to throw it accurately. In the half-dark, there are shiftings and sighs. To the south, the skirmishing continues. Someone snores.

He drops off the edge of wakefulness and into harbour-water sleep, livid with dreams, with swaying treetops in blue sky, with the stomach-swoop of falling. He dreams his mouth is full of earwigs and he is chewing them up and swallowing just to be rid of them, but they are bitter and he spits and spits and spits, and still he cannot be rid of them. He runs a stick along the railings, and up in the Dublin hills they are blasting granite: boom.

He wakes to the faint crackle of gunfire, the crunch of artillery. He gets up stiffly and stalks off for a piss. Someone smokes a cigarette. It is dawn already and it is cold, and if the Armée de l’Est did retreat last night, then they did not retreat this way.

“Here.” He slips his hand into his pocket, draws out the hand grenade and hands it back.

The maquis walk home in the early-morning cool, rifles shouldered. The boys are skittish, jostling; the older men tramp solidly and speculate. The Armée de l’Est must have got entangled with the Yanks, must be fighting harder than you might have thought conscripted POWs would fight. Or they must have taken another route, out towards Avignon or Aix. But this talk is soon stitched through with hopes for this year’s vintage, the promise of a puppy from the best gun dog’s next litter, a game of pétanque. He walks with them, but is not of them; the talk winds round him while he is silent, and his footfalls land on earth that was never to do with him. At his gate, he swings the gun from his shoulder and hands it back to Bonhomme. Who takes it and claps his arm and says, “Thank you, my friend.”

And then the crowd of them are on their way again, on into the little town.

—

In the dim kitchen, he wipes off some of the dirt, empties a pitcher down his throat, shovels in cold stew. Then he climbs upstairs and falls into bed, turns on his side, and sleeps.

Suzanne, having lain awake in his absence, and listened to the voices in the street and then him blundering around below, now slides out from underneath the covers. She treads barefoot round the house, chewing at her cuticles. The place already feels unfamiliar, as if they had never lived here. She picks up her mending, drops it again. She shunts her bare feet into espadrilles and scuffs out into the sun. Absently, she picks grapes from the trailing vines and eats them, warm with sunshine and not yet ripe, the sourness making her shudder. They turn to dust over her tongue and teeth, and yet she cannot wait for ripeness, sweetness. She picks another grape. She grows accustomed to the bitterness. Aigre, she thinks. It is not actually unpleasant. It is not difficult to bear.

And then, across the quiet, she hears the tear of an engine. She lifts her head to listen. It’s coming from out along the road and heading towards them. She straightens her shoulders and goes round to the front of the house.

She can feel the thrum through the ground. Above her, at the upper window, the shutters slam back, making her wince and glance up. He steps out on to the balcony in his vest and dust-stained trousers, his weak eyes searching into the distance. She shifts her gaze to follow his. A vehicle rounds the bend. It takes a moment to realize what she’s seeing. A rugged open-topped car — a jeep — burns up the road towards them. It is packed tight with men; the men are big and solid and they are dressed in fatigues. Soldiers. And, incongruously, Henri Hayden is perched on the back of the car. Spotting them, he waves and leans forward to speak to the driver. The car stops in front of the house, the engine churning. White grins on dirty faces. And all of Henri’s preparation, all those English lessons with Anna Beamish, are forgotten in this moment of unalloyed delight. He yells in French: “They were just going to pass us by!”

There are words exchanged between the soldiers in red, rich American English. The driver shunts the car into gear; Henri leans back as they pull away.

“It’s over! Good God, can you believe it? It’s all over! This fucking whore of a war! We’re liberated!”

And the jeep batters off up the road into town, flinging up a cloud of red dust. Suzanne raises a hand to shade her eyes. Henri disappears into the billows. Then the dust roils and settles, and the road is empty.

Suzanne turns to look back up to the balcony. Foreshortened by the angle, he is a darkness standing against the brilliant blue and she cannot make him out. He looks into the distance. He lifts his hands and presses them to his face. Then he turns away, and goes indoors.

She wipes her eyes with a flank of a hand. She sniffs. She shakes her head, and turns, and goes back to her garden.

And that is it.