A Country Road, a Tree

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN NEW PLACE, FOXROCK, Summer 1945

Ireland is green. It is lush and livid under the heavy sky. After the parched redness of the south, after the greys of battered Paris, his eyes strain to adjust.

Not just his eyes. His attitude, expectations, posture, stomach, nerves. He is out of kilter here more than he ever was.

Milk, for example.

He has become obsessed with milk. He follows the jug as it progresses from hand to hand, watches the white cord as it twines into the cups, watches the gobs of fat shine on the surface of the tea. The mixture is lifted to bristling lips and sucked; throats spasm, lips roll in on themselves and then unstick and stretch and pucker with speech. The milky tea is supped and sucked upon, as though it were something and nothing, as though its continuance were guaranteed; as if it were not, like everything else, as vulnerable and fleeting as the snow, that can be gone with just a change in the weather.

New Place, for example.

The big old house, Cooldrinagh, is sold, and she is in a modest bungalow just across the street from it. Of course she mentioned this in her letters, but it still comes as a surprise. It’s wrong, this house. It’s all edges, corners and awkward angles. It is delicate unstable ornaments and vases. The ceilings feel too low, the corridors narrow and full of turns. He stumbles around, stooped and cautious, haunted by the openness that had been here, the vacant plot of his childhood where the grass blew and cats fought and mated and he and Frank whooped and tumbled and trod in dogshit. He can hear voices from the old place, and the metronomic tock of a tennis ball. The larches stir themselves in the breeze, and one of them is already turning gold, and maybe there’ll be a child up there, clutching a high branch, swaying with the wind. The old house looms over the new; it has prior claim upon the sunshine. He lurches and ducks through the bungalow, but he is peeled into pieces: he drifts through other places, other times, can’t make himself be fully here.

Alfy is dead. And all this goes on.

Tea on the lawn should not be so difficult. It should not be utterly intolerable. The cairn of bread-and-butter, the heap of scones, the cake: they are not horrors in and of themselves. That poor spinster his mother has prised off the shelf for the occasion, God love her, and the friends and neighbours: he’s known some of them for years. But he just cannot get the hang of it again. If indeed he ever could. Not the rituals, not the conversation, not what is expected of him. He has gone tone-deaf to it. His mother tongue has disowned him.

Alfy died in the care of the Red Cross, the day after being freed. Maria’s letter is brief. It chokes him. And he is marooned here, islanded.

He sips his tea black and tries not to notice, but when his mother sets her cup down, it rattles against the saucer in uneasy timpani. When she speaks it is with a tiny shake of the head, as though negating every word even as it’s said. He tries not to notice, but he can’t not notice. There are too many negatives to ignore.

She passes him a tremulous plate. He takes a slice of bread-and-butter, passes the plate on. He cuts his piece into halves, into quarters, into tiny squares and then into triangles again, the famine habit still hanging hard on him. His mouth is bitter with decay. His jaw throbs. His tongue probes at carious, sharp-edged molars, at the incisor that rocks in its socket and bristles with pain.

The conversation swells and grows, and he lifts a fragment of bread-and-butter and slips it between his lips and tastes the fat and salt and sweetness of it.

He blinks, and the red inside his eyelids is the red of Roussillon; and there are tumbled stones, the hair-cracked road, and dusty broken boots shuffling along it.

He opens his eyes at the blank white linen tablecloth. Paris walls are pocked with bullet holes. Marble counters in the shops are gleaming and empty. Milk is a miracle. Bread is made of sawdust. The Péron twins all bones and shadows, and not growing as they should. Suzanne stands shivering in a queue. And he should not have left them all to that. He should not have brought himself here. Where he is entirely surplus to requirements.

But nonetheless, something is expected of him: he has been addressed. The pale old faces are watching him.

“Sorry. What was that?”

Smiles. A throat cleared. He has, of course, been through a good deal. Allowances must be made.

“Here.” His mother proffers a plate.

He looks down at a thick wedge of sponge. Under the pressure of the cake slice, the jam and cream have been extruded in a pinkish ooze, like bone marrow. It is an offence, an insult to her, his thinness. That he preferred France and famine to her, and this.

Her shake is bad. He takes the plate and sets it down. He looks at the cake. His teeth throb. He should force down a forkful, a few crumbs, a bit of jam; even if it makes him gag, makes his teeth sing out like little birds.

“Back in France—” he says.

Someone lifts a teaspoon, someone turns their saucer slightly; someone reaches for the sugar.

“My friends are getting by on next to nothing. On turnips and sawdust.”

The cake stares up at him, bloodied and gross; his fingertips recall the glide of paper scraps across a tabletop, the patterns forming. He blinks and he sees the floorboards inches above his face. The crate swinging at his knees along the country path. The clotted blooms of geraniums. His hands clasp and he feels the cold Sten gun in his grip. The haft of a shovel, the grave dug in the red earth. He is not here, he is not really here at all, he can’t figure out how to be.

“One hears that things are very bad,” someone concedes, “in France.”

His mother tugs at the edges of her cardigan and glances up at the sky and says, do you know, she thinks it might be coming on to rain, and someone says that it certainly looks that way; and conversation gathers round this thread like crystals and accumulates, as though everything were normal here and as though the world was the same all over and looked like this; as if there was tea and cake for everyone, and one last patch of sunshine on the lawn before another summer’s done.

And for now, what can he do but accept the fiction, however temporarily, and comply with it. He lifts his cup, swallows his tea down. He forks the cake into bits, and crumbs, and spears a fragment and places it in his mouth. It dissolves there like a communion wafer. It is good. He clears his plate.

She watches him discreetly as he eats, a glance and then another glance; a smile caught on her neighbour’s smile, the happiness that must of course be felt to have him home again. But underneath it all, underneath every swollen moment of his presence here, there is an ache for him that begins in the middle of her chest and rises to her throat and squeezes out her breath. To see him now, like this, a gaunt, worn creature made of rope and sticks, it has her heart turned sideways in her. Always the hardest path. Always the highest tree. He’d fall, and having fallen, would dust himself off and climb the tree again. When the tree itself had no need to be climbed at all; when there were lawns to run on and games of tennis and croquet and company; when there were so many other, more comfortable things, if he could simply choose them. But falling never knocked that strange determination out of him, and neither could she.

So she must learn. She will not win this war. But perhaps there can be peace.

—

He goes. Down the pavement and across the road; simply going, making distance. Even now after all these years he could still be hastening to catch up with his father, to fall in step with him in silence, walking away from this tangled mother-love, up to where things fall clear and the track rises through the cotton grass and the curlews calling; his father, gazing at the ground, would stop, and dig up a small stone with a fingernail and rub it clean, and pocket it in case of later need.

He searches out his own small stone in his pocket, the precious one a child’s clean eye had selected from all the stones at Greystones. He turns it over in his fingertips.

He misses Paris. Paris under any circumstances. Paris with its bones sticking through its skin, he’d take that over this unruffled plump buck Dublin that is making him gag on butter and milk and cream. That will not let him leave. There are no travel permits to be had, not for failing feckless writers. His teeth hurt like hell, his joints are full of grit, he’s short of breath, and he knows he is in no shape for anything, and is no good to anyone at all, and that France in ruins needs him less than she did when she was whole. France needs doctors, nurses, surveyors, engineers. The likes of him would only clutter up the place.

Today has been difficult.

He must grant himself that.

One would think these things got easier with practice, but they don’t. Failure still takes some accommodating. Over time, that stab of shame will dull to a low guilty ache, and he’ll go on with it like that, and get used to it. His book, the book written in Roussillon, the book that kept him sane, the book that, as Anna Beamish said, he had to write like snails have to make slime. Watt. Nobody wants it. Nobody will publish it. Yet another rejection came this morning. Nicely worded, and on not bad paper for the times that are in it. But a rejection nonetheless. And that, after all, is the thing about slime. He might have to make it, but nobody else is obliged to buy it off him.

He presses on. The breath heaves in and out of him. If he can tire himself sufficiently, he might just manage eventually to sleep.

—

Rigid in the dentist’s chair, his skull pressing hard against the headrest, his jaw is locked open. He can taste his own rottenness, smell it as he breathes. His mouth crawls with silvery pains; they’re everywhere, like ants.

The dentist’s face is practically in his mouth; Ganley pokes and tugs with his little wire sickle and the pain sharpens and turns red. The eyes narrow; the wire digs in under gum and he grips the armrests. This is nothing really; whatever happens here, however much it hurts, this is nothing very much at all.

“So you were in France for the duration, I believe?”

He swallows spit, open-mouthed. There are three fingers and a metal scraper in his mouth: he can’t even nod.

“Uh.”

The wire scrapes in below the gum again and the pain is brilliant, and he tastes blood, and it doesn’t matter.

“And you haven’t had these looked at, during all that time?”

It didn’t even cross his mind. “Uh.”

Ganley chinks the scraper down on a metal tray.

Released, he fumbles out his handkerchief, dabs his lips.

“Rinse, please.”

He rinses. The pinky-purple fluid stings. He spits into the bowl. The white ceramic streaks with blood; the blood oozes towards the plughole. He has known for a while that things in his mouth are not as they should be; the snags and edges, the deep throb of nerve, the tender itchy gum: there was more going on than there should have been. The clank and clatter of a sucking stone around his mouth can’t have helped. It had kept him going, but at a deficit. He will pay for it now.

“We see a lot of this at the minute,” Ganley says. He’s at the basin, scrubbing his hands.

“What’s that, then?”

“These accumulated problems. Soldiers and POWs have mouths like yours. Neglect, poor diet — over time, well, there’s just massive decay and infection. One sees it in country folk too. They’ll come up to town with twenty years’ worth of rot. It’ll already be wearing you down and affecting what you can and can’t eat. Isn’t that right?”

He nods.

Ganley dries his hands, sets the towel aside. “And every day you go on like this you’re risking septicaemia, and then, well, all bets are off. So what we need to do, and in pretty short order, is clean things up in there. A good few of these will have to go…”

As the dentist talks, his tongue slides around his teeth, up the smooth fronts of his top incisors, one and then the other; it presses into their concave backs. They’d been serrated, keen, pressing through the gum when he was seven years old; now their edge is worn flat and blunt and chalky-porous. And the right one gives under the pressure of his tongue. Like a tree with the roots dug out from underneath it.

“…pain, but we’ll put you under,” the fellow’s saying. “You’ll be sore for a while afterwards, but gum tends to heal pretty well once the source of infection’s gone. We’ll get some bridgework fitted and you’ll be grand.”

He swallows. It doesn’t matter. Not the pain, not the loss. It’s tiny. His mite dropped into the kitty, his little bit of suffering to help pay off an outraged, vengeful God.

“And the charge for that?”

“You’ll need to talk to Miss Cavendish. She can take you through the payments.”

He nods. He hasn’t properly gathered what will be removed and what will remain; it hardly matters. His mother will have to be consulted; he won’t be able to afford it without her help. He will be leathery and cadaverous, scarred, toothless, already decaying, staggering along to get into her grave before she can.

—

Now his stomach is sick with blood, and the inside of his mouth is cavernous and far too wet, and his tongue has become a strange mollusc that is living in it. His lips are dry and cracked and overstretched. He should have accepted Frank’s offer of a lift. He’s still dazed with nitrous oxide and here and there his gums are stitched and prickly, and there are craters too where the blood congeals and lifts in lumps and his slug of a tongue will not leave anything alone, and the street is busy and the sky is a bitter pearl-grey and he is stumbling along making a show of himself, he’s sure of it. It’s as much as he can do to walk a straight line, to not vomit blood into the gutter. The pain is distractingly various. He aches, he stings, he throbs, is sore. This has been a very expensive and thorough assault upon his person. He may as well have been mugged.

“Hey! Hello there! Hey! Hold on!”

He flinches, but stumbles on, one foot in front of the other, in the shoes his mother bought him. Bloody Dublin; just a big village. There’s always somebody who knows you. Whoever it is, they’ll give up, with any luck. But no luck: a hand lands on his arm. He stops, looks down at it. A small, smooth gentleman’s hand. He looks up.

“There, see. I knew it was you.”

A light-boned, boyish fellow grins at him. It has been a while, but he is instantly familiar. He swallows down the bloody wet.

“Alan.”

His voice is slushy, indistinct; he lifts the handkerchief to his ragged lips. Dr. Alan Thompson, who has been busy making his mother proud. Still boyish and light on his feet, and a decent chap, and a medical man; so he won’t faint or run shrieking at the sight of him.

Hands are shaken.

“Good to see you,” he manages.

“Good to see you too.” Alan frowns, though, peers in. “What’s up? You’re in a bit of a state.”

“Dentist,” he says.

“Butcher, more like. Extractions?”

He nods. “And fillings.” When he speaks, his whole skull aches.

“Come by the office. It’s probably not just your teeth needing attention.” Alan takes his arm. “In the meantime, I can see you require a calmative and a restorative, and those gums could do with an additional disinfectant.”

He can’t face any further procedures, not today. And anyway, he can’t afford it. He demurs.

Alan smiles. “No, no, I insist. What you need, my friend, is whiskey, and a good deal of it. That’s my professional opinion. I’m buying.”

It is the best thing he has heard in days. Alan steers him round, and off and into the Bleeding Horse.

—

It is all settled within the hour, within half a bottle of Jameson’s.

The smoke spools up to the ceiling and the drinkers press elbow to elbow at the bar. The first sip of whiskey sears, the second stings, the third he cups warm on his tongue and waits and looks to Alan, and his eyes crease at the company. He swallows, lifts his glass again and looks at the piss-gold stuff.

“I feel so much better. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself,” he says.

“Well, you’re not yourself right now, you know.”

They have the gist of each other’s recent lives. On closer inspection, time has had some small effect on Alan. He’s not quite the boy he used to be. His hair is receding a little, and there are lines at the corners of his eyes and from nostril down to lip. But overall, the years have handled the boy gently, compared with how they’ve battered him. He feels ancient; he feels shambolic. A broken-down old tramp. A mummy.

“Are you still at the writing?” Alan asks.

“I would be, but I can’t. Not here. Not at Mother’s. Never could.”

“You must be keen as mustard, then, to get back to France.”

“I have friends there. I’m worried.” He nods over his glass. “But only essential workers can travel, so—” A lifted shoulder. He is stuck.

“Lookit,” Alan says, leaning in closer. “Here’s something might interest you.”

He leans in too, already bleary, struggling to focus through the aftermath of gas and pain and shock and the current blur of whiskey.

“There’s this Red Cross venture I’m involved in,” Alan says. “We’re taking a hospital to France.”

“A what?”

“A hospital. It’s going to a little place called Saint-Lô; the town got flattened during the liberation. So we’re taking them a hospital. We’re getting our supplies together now and will make the crossing in August.”

“With a hospital?”

He sips, nods. “We have to take everything with us. Everything from syringes to marmalade to lino. There’s nothing there at all. We have to get hold of what we need here, sort it, store it, ship it off to France. And then get it all set up when we’re over there.”

“That is quite an undertaking.”

“Indeed it is. And we aren’t yet fully staffed. And so I thought. See, we’re looking for a quartermaster. Someone to take care of the logistics this end and then sort it out over there in Normandy.”

“I see.”

“And so, I was thinking, why not you? Because with your language skills, you could be our interpreter too. Some of us have schoolboy French, but…”

It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing that he could do. But then nothing ever does.

He raises his glass and sips. And then he nods.

“Good,” Alan says. “So then we’re agreed. And you’ll take another drink.”

—

He is overseeing the unloading of refrigerators in the Red Cross warehouse when Mrs. Hackett comes in with the evening edition and waves it in front of him. He reads the headline without understanding it. He stares at her.

“That hallion is dead,” she says. “Took his own life, can you imagine? That’s it.”

And so the war is over. He wipes his hands down his dungarees. He thinks, I am wearing dungarees, Hitler is dead, and the war is over.

It is a blossom-heavy bloody day in May, and it’s impossible to feel anything simple.

He does not go back to his mother’s house in Foxrock, but instead walks along the banks of the Liffey and up into the congested heart of town. There are aimless angry crowds on College Green, and a Union Jack smouldering on the gates. He keeps on walking. He ends up in a bar that he doesn’t normally go to, in the hope of seeing nobody he knows, but this being Dublin he just stares at his drink to make doubly sure. He downs whiskey after whiskey after whiskey, while all around him Dublin scratches and yelps and shivers at its old sores.

—

When it happens, there is nothing grand about it, nothing sublime. There’s no gale, no tossing waves, no spray in the air; it is not a storm-torn sky above him but the low ceiling of his mother’s bungalow. There’s no pathetic fallacy here. It might be the moment when everything changes for him, but that doesn’t oblige the world to notice, or do anything particular to mark the occasion.

It’s early evening. The electric fire is eating all the air. A dinner of pap uneasy in his belly, his mouth still raw, the radio on, he is writing to Suzanne as his mother studies a seed catalogue in the armchair and turns rustling pages. His tongue explores craters, jellied blood. He tells Suzanne about the Red Cross work, a salary, some hope of paying back Valéry Larbaud, his hope too that he will be returned soon to France, though not yet to Paris; he will come and see her as soon as he gets leave. Suzanne is a vein of guilt running through all the other manifold discomforts. His thoughts slip into that former life: his old apartment, and the cool solitude through which Suzanne would twine like a cat; her naked belly under his hand; a brilliant smile; eyes closed at the Opéra, there and gone, and gone sometimes for days. He doesn’t see that it can ever return to that. Something or other will have to be done. Because, by rights, Suzanne should be here, getting fattened up on butter, milk and cake; she would be, if they were married. It would be a coin into the kitty if they were.

His mother glances up from the lists of bulbs and corms and tubers; in the spring, they will brighten this new bleak wilderness of hers. She regards her boy. There is grey in his hair. There are lines around his eyes. She can see the old man that he will become and her heart aches for him. No comfortable desk in the family firm, no children on his knee, nothing so simply good, not for him. His weak eyes straining always on impossibilities.

She watches as he finishes his letter; he blows on it, then folds it up. There is a line between his eyebrows as he looks towards her. Perhaps he’s noticed the palsy in her hands, the way it makes the paper shake. She sets the catalogue aside, meshes her fingers and presses her bundled hands down into her lap to stop them trembling. She will not let him see that she is ill.

She fakes a shiver, says, “It is getting rather chilly, don’t you think?”

He colludes in the deceit. Speech still sounds strange and wet from his reordered mouth: “Shall I fetch you your shawl?”

“Lily can get it. I’ll call her.”

“No need.” Hands on knees, he’s pushing up to his feet.

“In my room, then. On the dresser.”

Beyond the stuffy electric heat, the hall is cool. He switches on the light, still uncertain of his way. He treads along to her door and pushes it open. The light from the hallway streaks past him and casts his shadow on the carpet. He flicks the bedroom light-switch and the shadows bolt.

The quilted coverlet is tugged square and straight, valance skirts brush the floor; the curtains hang in tidy folds, undrawn; the panes of glass reflect the room back at him. Her shawl lies folded neatly on the dressing table. As he moves towards it, his reflection in the window ambles up to meet him, faithful as an old hound. Long limbs, smoothed hair, glinting glasses, creased slacks. He lifts the shawl and his image copies him. He turns his back on it, lopes away. At the bedroom door, he switches off the light and glances back.

His image has vanished from the uncurtained window. Reflected there now is the bright oblong of the doorway and his blank silhouette within it; through the darkened glass he can see out across the garden and over the hedge, and on the far side of the street to the topmost storey of Cooldrinagh. The sky is filled with prickling stars; and up there, the nursery casement glows, and inside a child is perhaps kneeling to say his prayers. He watches the weave of larch branches as they stir across the light; he watches the lace they make.

And then the blind is drawn down over there, and the warm nursery is cut off, and all that remains is the pool of night that swells between the old house and the new. And his silhouette, angular and black and blank, framed by the bright doorway.

There is nothing grand about it; no waves, no wind, no briny spray. The world is not and never was in sympathy with him, nor with anybody else. But this is the moment when everything changes, the moment when the wide chaotic chatter and stink of it, all that wild Shem-beloved hubbub, falls away, and his eyes are trained on darkness and his ears on silence. On that stark figure, framed there on the threshold, unknowable and his.

He turns away. He closes the bedroom door behind him. He switches off the hall light: his fingertips trace along the wall, his heart racing.

He can find his own way now, in the dark. He doesn’t need the light.

CHAPTER NINETEEN NORMANDY, August 1945

Cherbourg is grey under the blue August sky; the coastline is encrusted with buildings like a rock-pool is with limpets. He leans against the railing, peering out.

All the crates and boxes, the equipment and supplies he had received, unpacked, repacked, stored and accounted for in the warehouse back in Dublin — the bandages, tinned ham, syringes, soap and cigarettes — are now nearing their destination. It had seemed abstract for so long, too big to conceive. He had focused on the parts and not the whole: all these months in the warehouse, with every labelled parcel stacked on every numbered shelf, with every crate he’d nailed shut and wheeled into its own exact spot in the stores, he had kept from his mind the vastness of the undertaking. It had been, simply, a way to get back to France.

But now, with landfall, that sense of his own desire crumbles and he absorbs an understanding of the work that is to be done.

The ship churns in past the harbour walls: the damage here seems geological. Those tumbled boulders, that rust-streaked stone, all of it massive and massively broken, as though it were the wear of centuries, of millennia of weather, as though it were the shrug of tectonic plates.

The quayside, when they reach it, is a lunatic forced into a straitjacket: chaos twitches beneath the surface and wriggles out around the edges. Rubble has been swept back; there are drifts of broken brick and stone and bent steel and copper piping and splintered beams. Work weaves around it all, between the temporary wooden huts and the idling trucks and the remains of the railway line, as if this were quite reasonable, as if the broken and twisted crane lying half in, half out of the water were just part of the natural scenery of this place, and the box car hanging with the ground gone from underneath it, the rails twisted across a crater, sleepers splintered, had somehow just grown there like a buddleia from the gaps between the stones.

He creeps down a swaying gantry. On the dockside he just stands as others jostle by him. He is overwhelmed by the rank smell of broken drains and diesel fumes, by the powdered brick under his feet, by the heaps of rubble and the carious bits of wall like broken teeth.

A hand clasps his shoulder.

“If you think this is bad,” Alan says, “just wait till you see Saint-Lô.”

He grimaces. He fishes out his cigarettes. He does not see how anything could be worse than this and still be. He lights up and struggles to fit himself back into himself. His boots are wrong. His tunic, trousers, puttees, are all wrong. He feels his eyeballs when he blinks. The world is in flitters, in bits and shreds. He has to work out how he can be in it, and move through it, again.

Alan beckons him along. He does his best to arrange his face.

“There’s a lift waiting for us,” Alan calls. “Come along, old son. Chop chop.”

—

He can see it in his mind’s eye, the dot dot dot of their progress across the map, as he sits in the back of the car, the wind in his eyes, the dust crunching between his remaining teeth. He does not have to do anything but wait. Crossing the French countryside like this, at thirty, thirty-five, forty miles an hour — watching the speedometer over the driver’s shoulder, the needle ticking upward even while the driver veers round potholes and rattles over the rough — changes everything, so that thistles and teasels are a dotted blur, and the stands of Queen Anne’s lace are brief pale clouds; on foot, he’d have seen them grow from a distant haze to up-close snowflake precision. A burned-out tank stands in a field, sooty and scorched and grown around with this summer’s nettles. And then it’s gone.

“You all right there?”

“What?” he has to yell over the noise of the car.

“You all right?”

He nods, turns back to the window. They thunder through a settlement — church-café-crossroads-and-it’s-gone. He’s left with an image of blowsy overblown roses, rank grass, charred beams, a crow perched on a fencepost, an empty window frame like a crucifix.

Then they’re out, and they rumble over a Bailey bridge, and there’s a flash of blue sky-reflecting water, and he glances off and up along the river and through the wide emptiness of the Normandy landscape, which manages somehow to be at once lush and bleak. He fishes for his cigarettes.

He holds the packet out to Alan, who takes a cigarette, eyes narrowed in the bright sun. He taps the driver’s shoulder, holds the pack for him to see. The driver shakes his head. There are two hundred miles or so between Cherbourg and Saint-Lô. They sit and smoke past deserted towns and farmhouses and neglected fields and burned-out barns and abandoned gear, and nobody talks. The emptiness gets inside him, like the cold.

—

A bank of cloud slid in overnight, while they slept, comfortable and oblivious, at their digs outside town; this new morning feels more like November than August. As they drive in through the dripping green, the damp makes his chest tighten; a cigarette soothes, and there are more cigarettes, cartons of them, crates. For once he can be certain, thanks to the generosity of Gallahers, that he will not run out of cigarettes.

The car crawls into what is left of Saint-Lô, along a road cleared through the rubble. There’s no colour here; it has been bleached out by the bombs. Dead trees stand skeletal against the grey sky. Mounds of rubble rise and fall into the distance. The town has become a desert of grey dunes, glittering with shards of glass. Here and there stand slabs of remaining wall, calling to mind those ruined English abbeys, the still, sad music of humanity, though these ruins stand not on grass but knee-deep in drifts of broken stone. Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

And all of it done in a day by the circling Allied planes. A necessary evil is an evil nonetheless. They don’t need a new hospital here; they need a new town. There can’t be anybody living here as it is. He yells it over the rattle of the engine, over the rumble of the tyres on the rough road: “There can’t be anybody living here.”

Alan nods in contradiction.

“How?”

A shrug, a smile. “It’s desperate, though, you can see it is.”

He turns back to the window. This place is not human any more. They lurch along with the motion of the car, and he stares out at the wilderness of stone, a shiver gathering at the back of his neck. The road itself is not real. It has been cut through the rubble. They’re rattling through ghosts of houses, backyards, shops and streets. It’s a film, black and white and grey, flickering past the window; at any moment it could just snap. Flicker out into blank white and be gone.

But then colour: red, a punch of it. They’re past now, rumbling along. He cranes round to look back.

The red is hanging from the bones of a tree.

He turns right round in his seat, stares out of the back window. He can see a bundle of flesh and grey and glowing scarlet, and for a moment it’s an atrocity. But then it coalesces and is…a child’s red pullover, a boy in shorts, and an older lad in flannels, his arm wrapped around the younger child. The two of them are huddled together on a tree branch in a casual embrace, legs dangling, watching the vehicles roll into town.

The figures shrink, and slide upward to the top of the rear window, and are gone.

That instinct to take oneself up and out of the adult world, to get that distance. What they may have observed from there, these past years. The tanks rolling in and out again. The planes droning up the valley. The first bombs beginning to fall.

—

On the edge of town the road gains clarity, begins to know itself again; it slips into old habits and rises over the hillside and is gone. They park up beside a government Citroën. Everybody gets out. There’s talk, handshakes, gestures round the empty plot. On the far side of the road, a fine glossy horse stares out over the fence.

“The stores will be set up at the stud farm,” the Colonel says. “We’ve requisitioned the attics.”

The farm. A handsome building; long and low, to accommodate the horses on the ground floor. The walls are hazed with bullet holes. Not a windowpane seems to have been left unbroken.

“First job there will be to make the place secure.”

Nods. People are desperate, and there will be temptations here. Penicillin is, right now, worth more than diamonds.

“And the hospital itself,” the colonel says, “the accommodation huts and walkways, will be over here.”

They pace it out; they talk. From this point, on the edge of town, the devastation is even starker. The lush Normandy fields, the hedgerows thick with flowers and foliage, and then just turn your head and everything is grey, broken, done with. They are wasting their time — he almost says it out loud to Alan and the colonel. They have made a mistake. How can anything they do here help with this? How can anything be retrieved from here? They may as well pack up and leave. But then, grey on grey, along the rubble-swept road, something moves. A figure — a woman. Wearing a drab greenish dress, she carries a basket hooked over her arm, and carries also her distended belly in front of her like a medicine ball. He stares, and then remembers himself and goes to greet her. Explains what they are doing there, in the emollient courtesies of French. She has big famine eyes. Her hands are twigs.

“We know. We are very grateful you have come, you Irishmen. You are very welcome.”

Then she takes a bottle from her basket and hands it to him. “God bless you,” she says, and then she turns and walks away.

“And you, Madame.”

He’s left there, standing, the bottle in his hands, watching her go. From the back, she is narrow. Skinny legs, the wings of her shoulders visible even through her clothes: no hint at all that she is expecting. Fifty feet away and she pauses. He thinks she might be about to turn back, as if there’s something more she’d like to say, but she just stands there, head bent, hand to her back, catching her breath. Then she straightens up and just walks on. As though tomorrow is worth the trouble that it takes to get there.

—

The prisoners of war are marched there from some draughty detention camp a little further out along the road. French guards march with them, though they do not give the impression of being eager to escape. They all walk with the same fatigued, uncomfortable gait, as if their feet are broken. Their uniform is faded to the grit-grey of the ruins. They are the boys who should not have had to be soldiers, they are the old men who should not have had to be soldiers again. They are the very young, they are the very old, they are whoever was left to guard this stretch of the Atlantic seawall when the storm broke.

Markers for the foundations are laid out already: stakes hammered into the ground and tied with string. The architect is pacing, talking, pointing, showing around the man from the Ministry of Reconstruction. While this discussion takes place, the prisoners are allowed to fall out and rest. Overlooked still by the guard, they sink to the ground in a cluster, quiet and acquiescent.

He wanders over to them. He squats stiffly down.

“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” he says in German. “About the work you will be doing here.”

A look, a quirked eyebrow, bushy as a hedge.

“We have cleared the rubble here, we dug the graves. I think we can manage to build this little hospital for you.”

So these are the men who cut the ghost roads through the town. He nods. “You have building experience from before the war?”

The old fellow bunches his lips, shakes his head. “I don’t. But I know hospitals. I was a doctor.” He lifts his hands and turns them for inspection. Deep grained with grey, the nails blunt and matt with wear. “You wouldn’t know.”

—

He keeps his interpreting work brisk but loose, moving from French to English to German and back again as he turns between the French surveyor, the Irish staff, the German labourers. The challenge is to maintain the register as meaning is decanted out of one language and into the next; courtesy is all too easily spilt. And if it’s not there already, he might drip a little in. It’s not professional to moderate the tone like this, but then he is not a professional interpreter. And it eases, it soothes; there was a time when courtesy was a normal thing, and it helps to recall it. The ditch will be a metre deep if you please. It will be half a metre wide, if you would be so kind, sir.

The labourers take off their tunics; they work bare-chested or in vests. Thin, greyed bodies; bones on show. The staff take to handing out tea and biscuits, cigarettes, bread-and-jam. He feels that he is rich indeed. He becomes promiscuous with his cigarettes.

The prisoners of war begin to talk amongst themselves while they work, and it feels much better than that exhausted silence. Sometimes they address a remark to him. The talk makes the guard edgy, but it makes him feel at ease: the fact of it, the normality. To speak another language is to step into the other fellow’s boots. It erases difference. He tells the guard, “They’re remembering the dinners that their wives and mothers used to make.” And the guard raises his eyebrows, but nods, can understand.

Up at the stables, the windows are being boarded up, the locks fitted, the shelves clapped together out of packing crates.

Striding across the waste ground, his eye catches on colour. High up, on a windowsill, in a tooth of remaining wall, the two boys perch, legs dangling, looking down on the work going on there like little gods. He watches as the younger tugs at the elder’s sleeve; they slither down and scramble away. They leap from the end of a buried bedstead, tight-rope round the rim of a fallen window frame, thunder over a flattened door. The blot of red shrinks, then disappears amongst the ruins.

—

The men are piecing together the flat sides of the first hut like a gingerbread house when it begins to rain. The water dots and darkens the wood. The roof goes on in slabs, seals off the space beneath it, changes its nature from outdoors to in. The rain chills the skin; it soaks through tunics and trousers, it traces streams upon the gritty earth, teases in between the rubble, makes white runnels of plaster dust and broken-up cement.

His boots sink into the clay, suck out of it. Rain streams down his face and into his eyes and brings with it the salt of his skin and makes his eyes sting. The men take their boots off at the door. They pad across the boards in damp socks. The beds are hustled in, the bedding unpacked and rolled out. A chair, a locker, a bed each. One simple room for the eight of them to sleep and eat and write and read in, till all the other rooms are built. The rain runs off the new pitched roof and into guttering, and away.

Elsewhere, the rain drips through botched-up roofs and oozes in through heaped rubble and trickles down into cellars so that women go barefoot to save their shoes, and there is nowhere safe to put the baby down.

He writes a letter, wraps a parcel to Suzanne. Biscuits, coffee, a small packet of powdered milk, gleaned from his rations. He doesn’t need as much as he is given. He barely draws on his salary here; he is saving hard to repay the Larbauds.

That night, he lies awake in the dark, listening to the breathing of the sleeping men. Listening to the scratch of rats through heaps of broken stone.

—

By day, the site is an anthill, a Babel tower. Bricklayers hoist hods and slop cement, a team of Algerians rolls the hardcore flat between the huts; there is the smell of cut timber, and the grate and sigh of the saws, and the spooling out of cable and setting in of pipe, and voices raised in different languages and in heavily accented attempts at others. Fights do not break out. Sometimes, though, already, laughter does.

The stores, housed away from the main site, up above the stables, are bustling. Supplies arrive and are sequestered; people come with chits and dockets that must be filled and filed and the duplicate returned. Below, the horses thud hooves against their wooden stalls. Rain drips where a slate is missing, rain spills gurgling from a blocked gutter, wet footprints darken the floor. But, despite all the come-and-go, this remains a solitary place. It’s his.

Though there is company here today in the form of a prisoner who is wiring the place for light.

“Here,” the prisoner says in German. “Do you want to see how it’s done?”

He watches blunt fingers manage surprisingly delicate operations, tweak and twist bright copper strands, fiddle in tiny screws. The work is deft and precise and there is a clear logic to it, a followable flow.

“I see.”

The prisoner inclines his head, still squinting at the work.

“My gaffer always said,” he says, “gas light’s kinder on the ladies, but electricity’s sharper, electricity’s the thing.”

“He was right.”

“He was always right. At least, he was until he wasn’t.”

Then the prisoner clips the casing closed and twists in another screw to hold the whole thing shut. He flips the heavy switch. Light leaps; it scatters itself through the maze of shelving and slaps itself on to the stacked packing crates. It casts the prisoner’s thin face in deep shadow.

“Job’s a good one.”

He proffers his cigarettes. The two of them sink down, side by side, backs against a packing crate. He strikes a match; they lean in. The electric light is a brilliant cone over them.

“Only use the lamps when you really need them,” the German says, gesturing upward. “Or you’ll run out of diesel in no time.”

“Good point.”

The refrigerators hum and the lights fizz and the generator rattles and the boards are hard beneath him, and the lamp burns down on them like a spotlight, and he’s aware too of the sweat-and-tobacco stink of the man beside him and the heave of smoke into his lungs, and its slow spool out of him, and the reality of all of it is insistent, demanding to be noticed. He wants, oh God, he needs. Time, a locked door at his back, and time. Pen and paper and an empty notebook and no concern as to what the end will be, but the means, please God, he needs the means, he needs to write, he needs to shuffle the cards, tamp down the pack. He needs the quietude that it brings. He needs to learn.

He heaves himself up, pads over to switch off the light.

He hears the puck of cigarette from lips. “It used to be beautiful,” the fellow says. “Where I’m from, I mean. My town. But it’s all been bombed to shit like this place too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thorough, your lot, when it comes to that kind of thing.”

“They’re not my lot.”

“Which lot are your lot, then?”

He shrugs. “I don’t have a lot.”

The other says, “I’m not going back.”

“You mean, home?”

“I wrote to my wife, I always did since I was conscripted, but the moment that I heard about the bombing I wrote. I’ve written to her thirty-two times since. After the first three letters and nothing back, I started writing to my mother-in-law too, and when nothing came of that either, I sent notes to friends, the neighbours, and to my daughters’ schoolteachers, and then to the priest, and then the doctor. I sent a postcard to the grocer, asking how business was, letting him know how things were going here.”

He rolls his cigarette along his middle finger with his thumb. He looks at the fellow sidelong, waiting.

“They don’t reply. But I keep on writing, and I’m never going back. So. There we are.”

He gets to his feet, leaves the other fellow sitting. Through the maze of the stores, he makes his way to where a box is tucked in behind a bigger box, and he fishes out the bottle of Jameson’s and two enamel mugs. He brings them back, sinks down and pours large measures for them both. They sit in the shadows, and they drink.

—

At the outpatients’ department, people queue for half the day. They bring scabies, bronchitis, arthritis and tuberculosis from their damp and overcrowded dwellings. They bring burns, scalds, contusions and raw open wounds wrapped in grubby tea-towels and handkerchiefs. Tired people are clumsy, and everybody’s tired here: who can sleep with the rain dripping in on them, with their stomachs growling, with the kids coughing all night long? And everything is botched together, provisional, unsteady here, and so accidents happen: there is nowhere safe to cut up a potato, or put a hot pan down.

And children play in the ruins, since there is nowhere else to play. Masonry falls in showers on them. Cellars cave in underneath their feet. They pick up detonators in a grubby palm and call their friends to see. They get caught up in twisted rusty wire, and fall on broken glass.

Even in the countryside, people are not safe. Farm labourers are rushed in from the fields, only a tourniquet and their own cussedness to keep them from bleeding out in the back of their neighbour’s car. There are landmines everywhere, and all sorts of unexploded ordnance, and there is not another hospital for a hundred miles.

As well as blood and flesh and phlegm and parasites and bacteria and shattered bone, the people bring flowers, fruit, eggs, bottles of Calvados and live chickens. They press these on the staff. Treatment is free, but there is a need to express gratitude, to offer some kind of payment. And so they give chickens, and Calvados, and fruit, and often tears.

He signs out the streptomycin, the syringes and suspensions and suture-silk and dressings and tea and cigarettes and sugar and marmalade and tinned ham. Others manage their application. He hands the packages over to the practised hands of nurses, orderlies and caterers, and ticks the items off his list, and when the new stocks arrive he shelves them, and notes them down, and hands over the receipt. What he is managing here, he likes to think, is the flow of decency. That it flows in this direction is long overdue.

Suzanne’s letter is slow in coming too, and when it arrives it is slight and strange and he reads more between the lines than is written on the paper. She thanks him for the biscuits and the coffee and the milk. She is surprised that he could so easily spare them. She wonders when he will next be in Paris. He will see how things really are for everybody there. But paper is scarce, and the sheets are small, and slight as tracing paper, and he’ll forgive her if she doesn’t squander a second sheet on this. But then she doesn’t even fill the first one.

—

He takes his turn to patrol the stores at night. For all the work that has been done to secure the place, it’s still vulnerable. And so he paces out the old vaulted attics with a flashlight, the lights left off to conserve fuel, listening to the scratch and squeak of rats in the stalls below, and the horses as they step and blow and huff, and the clatter of the generator that keeps the refrigerators humming even when the lights are out. A loaded revolver is strapped against his ribs; it lies hard and it makes his skin twitch like a horse’s. If someone breaks in, and isn’t scared off by his mere presence and a flashlight, he is expected to fire.

Between patrols, he sits under one light, his back to a tea-chest, his coat buttoned to his chin, feet drawn up towards him. He sets the gun aside. He opens a book. A quick choice from the crate supplied along with the cigarettes and whiskey, the Scrabble set and table-tennis, for the leisure hours of the Irish volunteers. He turns pages. The words skim by and do not settle. Instead, he feels the press of his own thoughts, the swell of the dark space at the back of the head from where the images start to spill. He’s lost: the broken boots, the stiffening limbs, the sun sinking, rising, sinking; a country road, a tree. This is a waterfall that he is falling with, these are dream-thoughts on the edge of sleep; they slip away and turn to mist when he looks at them directly.

A noise. His head jerks up; he sets the book aside. A thud — something fell. And then a metallic clattering, scuffling and rummaging: someone has broken into the stores. He reaches for the gun. The darkness stretches out across the countryside from here. The hospital is more than a yell away. He is all by himself with this. The scuffling continues.

He unfolds up from the floor.

All is as black as backstage; his torch picks out patches as he moves through the stores. He clicks the safety off. He must defend a million cigarettes. A ton of jam. Fifteen crates of whiskey. And sterile dressings, bottles of stinking yellow iodine, and those milky, opalescent little ampoules of penicillin, snugly packed into their boxes, the boxes stacked in their humming refrigerators. In purely utilitarian terms, penicillin, perhaps, is worth shooting someone for. His hand is sweaty — he switches the gun into his left, wipes his palm down his trouser-leg, swaps the pistol back again, fumbling the torch. He treads softly down between the crates.

He slides round the corner. A carton lies sideways on the floor, tins tumbled out, the lids burst off some of them. Something dark writhes over the pale spillage. He doesn’t fire. He reaches for the light switch, flicks it. And the rats scatter. He lets a breath go. Then he goes to fetch a dustpan and brush. He sweeps up the powdered milk that has been spilt and pours it into the bin. He rights the remaining tins and sorts through them, and puts the untainted ones back on the shelf. There is, after all, no point crying over it.

Later, the gun handed over to the next watch, he walks back to the barracks through the blue pre-dawn, smoking a cigarette, not knowing quite where to put his feet, since the path itself seems to be heaving. A whisk of tail, a dart, a flash of eye; dozens of them, scores, bold as you like. Their usual runs and haunts have been blown out of existence in the bombing; the warehouses and stables and farmyards are no longer there — and so the rats spill everywhere, and seek out new shelter and new sources of food. Just like anybody would.

To the east the sky is paling, and soon another day is going to happen to him, but first there must be sleep. He toes off his boots outside the door, carries them along the row of sleeping men. At his own bed, he flops his greatcoat across the low cross-tie of the roof. He unbuttons his tunic, steps out of his trousers, clambers into bed. He lies, blinking in the darkness, his tongue exploring the spaces in his mouth, the remaining teeth like monoliths, the smooth bald gum. Out there in the darkness there is a scratching and a scuttling, and the almost-too-high-to-hear squeaking of the rats, and something must be done about that, before they taint everything and take over the place entirely. In his mind, he assembles another package, composes another letter. He thinks, a tin of butter, a tin of ham, a tin of peaches. What else can he glean, for Mania and the boys? He blinks. He blinks. And then he’s gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY PARIS, October 1945

They’re rattling down a boulevard in a Red Cross car. He has brought a bag of pears with him from Normandy; it sits on the parcel shelf. And this, oh God, this is Paris again, look at it, and there’s money in his pocket, look, there are people on the terraces, a tram swings round the corner. He’s driving through the city. His uniform-issue boots are sound and sturdy; he has a bag full of sweet and bulging pears. The war is over and so things should be good, but there is still so much that is lacking now. And this is an uneasy anticipation, seeing her again.

He spins past the Arc de Triomphe, along the Champs-Élysées and through the Place de la Concorde, so that his passengers can see the city. The open spaces of it, spinning with bicycles, rattling with buses and even a few official cars. And, what is more — and is more striking — an absence of German Army vehicles. There are no big fair men in grey-green, no bunches of Green Beans on the terraces or clusters strolling down the streets in civvies with their cameras. This is not somebody else’s city any more. The bunkers and the checkpoints have been dismantled or turned to other use. Pigeons flutter upward. He follows their flight past a broken window patched with a board, and a spray of bullet holes in a pale stone wall. There are scars left here too. Marks of harm. His eyes follow the pigeons up into the wide clear sky.

“Watch the road, eh?”

He swerves on to the Pont de la Concorde, and they are rattling along through the Left Bank. He drops his passengers at their lodging on rue Jacob — the quiet loveliness of the rue Jacob — and then he goes — well, he goes home, he supposes. This is the nearest thing there is to home. Back through these narrower streets, where an occasional bicycle wobbles aside, and a pram is bumped up on to the pavement, and a few commercial vans are loading and unloading. And as the moment of return approaches, things slow and become thick with apprehension.

The lift is hors de service. Trudging up seven storeys, breathless, to the apartment, and she is there — he knows it instantly. Though it is not warm, nor lit, she is there, her presence filling up the space like water. And he is gooseflesh and unease with it, not knowing even now what kind of return this will be.

“Suzanne?”

—

Her belly contracts. She drops her sewing aside, gets to her feet. Because coming in through the apartment door, there he is, out of nowhere, like a magic trick, and just as exasperating. All this time his world has been expanding, and has become busy and bustling and full to overflowing, while hers has contracted to a pinprick. She is hunger, body, tiredness, the slog of simply scraping by. She has nothing left for him.

And now he is looking around the flat, and then looking at her, as though it were something and nothing. As though it were inevitable he’d be there, now, this minute, and why would it be a surprise to her at all?

“Well,” he says.

“Well.”

And in uniform! Trust him to spend the war in hand-me-downs and hedgerows and then deck himself out in conspicuous uniform just as everybody else is shedding it. The new gear — greatcoat, cap, trousers, puttees, tunic — is it that that makes him seem all the more contained, unknowable, and just — different?

She stands up, takes a step closer, looks him over, trying to read this new iteration of him. He has a kitbag hanging from his shoulder; the other holds a small calico sack. It bulges with something, with lots of somethings, small and rounded and smooth somethings.

“How are you,” he asks, “my flea?”

“Oh,” she says, unsettled by the endearment. “You know, it goes.”

He drops his kitbag and reaches out an arm and she steps into the space. He holds her there a moment, the both of them like boards. One arm is wrapped around her.

“You’re thin,” he says.

She can hear the rumble of his voice in his chest. She nods, her head sliding up and down against serge. Everyone in Paris is thin. His flesh, though, has filled itself out. He is more solid than he used to be. She wants to say, I am happy to see you, but the truth of it is not quite as clear as happy. There has been too much wear and tear for there to be straightforward happiness now. There is not the substance, the structure left for that.

Now, he pushes her gently away and goes to unbutton his coat, which makes him remember the calico sack.

“Here,” he says. “I brought something for you.”

She swipes at her eyes. More bounty from his better life; it makes her feel sour. But the mouth of the bag opens on a clutch of pears and offers up a cloud of scent, floral, sweet; her mouth floods.

“Oh, the cow,” she says.

She dips in a hand and lifts out a fruit and hands the bag back to him. The pear is heavy with juice; between her fingertips the skin is grained and toad-like. She presses her mouth into the soft flesh, her eyes closing. She eats, wordless, the wet sweetness of it astonishing, while he sets the bag down and slides off his coat and hangs it up and looks around the scant little apartment, and twists his head to peer up at the sleeping loft above. She sucks the last of the flesh from the strands of the core and drops what’s left into the wastepaper basket. Juice has gathered under her lower lip and she wipes it upward with the flank of her hand. Then she notices him, noticing her.

“Excuse me,” she says.

“You’re hungry. Have another.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dips her hand in again. Her cheeks flush. She bites carefully. Little fractions of wet flesh and grainy skin. Turned and lingering on the tongue, while he climbs the stairs to the little sleeping loft and looks around. Like a dog circling its bed.

He calls down to her. “We’ll go out for lunch,” he says. “If you’d like to.”

She pauses, swallows. “Can we?”

“Yes,” he says. “Why not?”

She tilts her head, unseen, considering the new authority in his voice. This is having money, she supposes. A salary that just happens to him every month. This is having more than enough, rather than substantially less.

“I’d like that,” she says.

She drops the threads of the second pear into the wastepaper basket. She fetches her shoes and sits down to put them on. Her hands are cold and sticky with juice. He clumps back down the stairs. She does not look at him. You have brought me pears, she thinks, but this is what I have brought for you: this is all that I have in abundance. We have had a glut of horrors here.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“About our friends,” she says, and then she pauses and has to clear her throat, because after all there is scant satisfaction in sharing this.

“What do you know?”

“Different stories.”

He looks away; she follows his gaze across to his bookshelves, his desk.

“Not yet,” he says.

“What?”

“Later,” he says. “Just not yet.”

She stares at him. Unseen, she shrugs. “Well.”

He can do as he pleases. He always will. She is too worn out with it all to care.

—

They eat lunch in a little local bistro, where they used to eat before. Frayed cuffs on the waiters, who are men he doesn’t know; washed-thin dresses on the ladies, bare legs. He recognizes the sisters who used to run the hairdresser’s. There is bread, since bread is no longer rationed, and he has rillettes and cornichons, and they have a pichet of wine to share. They are quiet; the whole place is quiet. Life goes on, after all. It insists on it.

The meal is expensive. It is three times what they would have paid for something rather better before the war. But it is welcome. And the coffee, when it comes, is real, and strong, and good. It makes her shudder.

“Will you be back,” she asks, “do you think?”

“To Paris?”

“Yes.”

He casts his gaze around the restaurant, taking in the scuffed tiles, the thin faces, the empty mirrored shelves where there had once been bottled spirits and liqueurs.

“Where else would I go? My contract ends in January.”

She nods. She is making those little moves — napkin laid aside, bag hunted for and opened, peered into — that signal departure. “Well, I’m teaching this afternoon, so…”

People still learn to play the piano, then. And children still sit their exams, no doubt. They go on holiday, and celebrate their saints’ days and their birthdays. For all it still feels so sketchy and provisional, they are now living in a world where a Jewish boy’s baccalaureate counts for something again.

“I have to return to Saint-Lô tomorrow,” he says.

“I see.”

“I’m only in Paris to fetch rat poison. It’s not easy to get hold of, not out there.”

“Right.”

“I’ll send you something when I get back. What would you like? What do you particularly need?”

She closes her eyes and half smiles at his entire failure to understand. She needs everything; she has nothing but needs. Some can be kept at bay, others are impossible to assuage.

“A bar of soap,” she says. “A toothbrush. A lipstick. Anything at all.”

He walks with her to the Métro. By the square, a small child picks up horse chestnuts from the pavement; a woman watches, having watched him all the way through all the war. He recalls the baby in the pram being bumped along the cobbles, that razor-clear autumn of ’41, when he’d carried the typed-up information across town to Jimmy. And Jimmy — he wonders, how did Jimmy fare? Did he get through it all and out the other side?

At the steps down to the station, Suzanne kisses him on the cheek, brief and cool. “What happened to your coat?” she asks.

He looks down at the clean green serge of his Red Cross greatcoat, with its white and red armband, then back at her, nonplussed. Nearby, a pigeon scrats in the gutter. It is an ugly battered thing, peg-legged. Pigeon pie.

“No,” she says. “Your other coat.”

“Oh, yes. I left it behind, in Ireland.”

“Why did you do that?”

He’d hung it up in the wardrobe in his mother’s spare room. With his father’s still-cherished overcoat and shoes, her fox fur, the stink of camphor. He’d closed the door on it and turned the key, that same evening, in that same darkness, his mother’s shawl still over his arm.

“It seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, they gave me this one, so.”

“Will they let you keep it?”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

She tsks, shakes her head. “What’ll you do, then, when your contract’s up?”

He shrugs.

“What do you think a new coat would cost, right now?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well,” she says. He is still himself, for all he’s changed. “You’ll find out, I suppose. Till I see you.”

Then she kisses him again, because it seems the thing to do, and she turns away, and she clips down the Métro stairs.

Now that she is gone, he could go back to the empty apartment, to the peace and solitude of it. He could turn the key on the rest of the world and let him and the silence warm to each other; he could find a notebook, start to write. But instead he walks, hands stuffed into his pockets, turning the pebble round and round in his fingertips, the collar of his greatcoat scratchy at his jaw. He presses on through the half-broken, skin-and-bones, scraping-by life of the place, through the city clattering with footfalls and pierced with voices and rumbling with drays, past the men in old coats and shoes worn to shreds, and young women in threadbare dresses and bright lipstick, and the old ladies in black clothes who have shuffled their way through the war with shopping bags and hairnets intact. The blue paper has gone from the street lamps. They have torn down all the German signposts, and the yellow placards from outside the Jewish shops. And the city, ticking over, ticking on, is nonetheless thick with loss, as infested with absences as the hospital is with rats. Walking in Paris, in October 1945, is the loneliest thing in all the world.

He takes his cigarette packet out and touches the one remaining cigarette. He puts the packet back.

He will get used to it, just as he has grown accustomed to the missing teeth, the missing toe, his scar. He will learn to accommodate the loss.

—

There are places, even in the ruins, that are touched by grace. Saint-Lô at night, and a little window is warm and lit. It is curtained with an old lace shawl to disguise the new and dimmer substitute for glass and the figures that move around on the other side.

Because inside the small front room, there’s a piano and a tumbler of Calvados, and there’s music playing, and it is all quite pleasant and comfortable and people do like to be there. Men like to be there. That Calvados on the piano-top is his, and he sips it whenever the music allows him to, because it is him playing the music, popular and sentimental songs. One of the girls leans against the instrument and watches him play. He is surprised, rather, by the ease of the music after so long an absence; his fingertips find their way without much need for thought. The Calvados may be helping with that, since he is not concerned about the performance; he just performs. The old upright is practically in tune, though the middle C key has gone mute. Which is not bad, when so many other pianos are now tangled wires and splintered teeth.

The prostitutes wear cardigans over their slips and frocks. They have boots and slippers and bare legs. They shiver and huddle into themselves; their skin is blueish. There’s something familiar about the girl who’s watching him play; he can’t quite place her, but then he’s half-cut, and the uncut half is taking care of the music, so that doesn’t leave anything very much for working out where he has seen the prostitutes before.

Late on, blurry with drink, he’s obliged to leave the piano and amble off to find the necessary. He opens an inner door expecting a back room or the kitchen, but there’s night air and stars above, where the walls and roof have been blown clean off. A man is pissing up against a heap of broken bricks. Finished, the fellow buttons up and slips past him with a grin, heading back indoors. He takes his turn out in the night and adds his water to the musky pool. As he pisses, he lifts his face to the rain, closes his eyes, enjoys the easy sway of his own Calvados-adjusted senses.

The door shut behind him, he returns to the piano, and people are talking and laughing and going on as if there were a whole house standing square around them, not just a few chancy habitable rooms. This is what the world is liable to do nowadays — collapse in ruins — and people go on behaving as though it were nothing very much at all.

He sips from his cigarette, one hand keeping the rhythm going; then his smoke smoulders and fades out in a saucer, and a girl tops up his drink, and when the woman leans closer as a song ends, he gets up to hear her, and someone else slides into his seat at the piano, and his head reels and the woman takes his arm and smiles, and says his French is sweet.

“Come upstairs with me,” she asks, “why don’t you?”

And so she leads him off upstairs, and it turns out that he is drunker than he’d thought he was, or that the stairs are out of kilter: they pitch him sideways, so that he has to hang on to the bannister and clamber up them like a mountaineer. Perhaps what’s familiar about her is just hunger: the pinched look, the stick-thin, bones-on-show appearance makes sisters of them all. French women just look like that now.

Upstairs with her, the door shut behind them, and she peels off her cardigan and steps out of her slip, and he can see the press of hipbones through the skin and the dip like salt cellars in her collarbone, and when she lies down her breasts fall away sideways from the bones of her ribcage, and her breasts are so soft, very soft, and traced with mother-of-pearl stretchmarks, and he rolls a prophylactic clumsily on and is inside her, and it is only just as he comes that he remembers her, heavy with pregnancy, handing him a bottle of Calvados and telling him he was welcome here.

—

A pack of boys races down the newly surfaced roads; smaller kids huddle together on the corner, hovering over a concoction of mud and leaves. Girls have chalked a game on to the ground and are skipping through it. He walks, clipboard in hand, beside the colonel.

“On the whole, successful, I’d say.”

“And the corpses dealt with?”

“Incinerated, yes. You know what the kids are like here. Play with anything.”

They stop short to allow a pack of little children to thunder by.

“This is a hospital, not a playground!” the colonel yells after them.

They hurtle on, joyous, heedless.

“This place is getting lousy with them,” the colonel says. “Worse than the rats. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

The building work continues. Trucks grind back and forth; there are staff cars, locals’ cars, and half a dozen ambulances that hurtle in and out of the site at all hours, day and night. The children do stand a good chance of getting hit.

“Their mothers send them to play here,” he says.

These are kids who are missing fingers, who have brutal scars beneath their clothes; these are kids who are also missing parents, brothers, sisters, friends. For all the risks from traffic, they’re safer here than anywhere else for miles and miles.

Things are getting better. Things are becoming sound. There’s asphalt on the roads and on the paths. There’s glass, or something like glass, in all the windows. There’s lino on the labour-room floor — since there is breeding still, even now, even in this devastation. There are curtains round the beds, and clean sheets and warm blankets neatly tucked in. The operating theatre gleams with aluminium and sterile steel. The rain doesn’t drip through, the wind is kept at bay, the rats are in retreat. There is tea and there are biscuits and there is bread-and-jam when it is required, and it is often required. There’s kindness here. There’s decency amongst the ruins. It is something to behold.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE NORMANDY, December 1945

Just a quick run, they said. Just out to Dieppe and back. You’re well used to the route, sure you could do it in your sleep. Pick up the new matron and that’s you. On you go. Your time’s your own after that.

But the ship is delayed. And he’s an idiot because he didn’t even think to bring a book. And now it’s snowing. And that’s just the fucking marzipan, that is. Snow. Snow is general all over Normandy.

The hut is all steam and cigarettes. He looks at his watch, considers how bad the roads will be if she arrives now, if she arrives in ten minutes, half an hour. An hour. Two. For fuck’s sake. The wind buffets the windows and the stove blows back smoke. He finds an abandoned copy of the London Times, sits, unbuttons his greatcoat, tries to read.

Then he’s up again, newspaper hanging, to peer out of the window at the snow as it scuds in flurries round the holding yard. He buttons his coat up and tucks his muffler in. He looks at his watch.

He’s half gone already. He’s back in Paris, seven flights up on the rue des Favorites. And he’s here, in a prefab in Dieppe, watching the snow build on the windowsill, watching it fall thick on the yard beyond, pristine as a ream of paper.

At the hatch, the girl gives him coffee and bread-and-margarine and an apology for it, though he’s happy enough with such frugal stuff. He eats, smokes, drinks coffee. Picks up the paper again, thumbs through it, hands it over to an English doctor waiting for his passage home, who settles into it readily. It belongs to the world that the doctor is returning to, not this one, where he remains.

When the ship finally enters the harbour, the throb of it can be felt through the quayside building. He steps out into the night. He turns up his collar, pockets his glasses; snow whips into his face. The vessel heaves and groans as it lines itself up along the quay. The closer it gets to actually being here, the more things seem to slow. It takes an age for moorings to be secured. Another age for the gangways to be lowered. The passengers creep off as though they are half-dead.

She looks exhausted. He shakes her hand and takes her bag and ushers her over to the truck. She shivers inside her cape; he holds the door open for her and takes her arm to help her in. It takes some restraint not to chivy her along.

“Thank you.”

They drive into the night, snow swarming in the headlights. Away from the coast, the wind drops and the snow falls heavily. The windscreen wipers shunt it into wedges; lumps fall off and fly aside. The snow makes a dazzling tunnel of the headlights. The darkness beyond is absolute.

“How far is it,” she asks, “to Saint-Lô?”

“A hundred and seventy miles, give or take.”

They are both illuminated, briefly, by the flare of a passing vehicle. The road ahead, caught suddenly in their merging lights, looks as smooth as a pillowcase, and then the other vehicle has passed and their truck rackets along, lurching into potholes, through ruts and across debris, all hidden by the blanketing snow. He winces, but doesn’t ease off. She shifts in her seat, glances at him; he remains in profile, eyes on the spinning dark.

“Is it necessary,” she asks, “to go quite so fast?”

“It’s not as fast as it looks.”

After a moment, he fishes his cigarettes off the parcel shelf and offers them to her; she takes one, then takes his rattling matches off him too and they lean together so that she can light his cigarette along with her own.

“You should try to have a sleep,” he says.

“I don’t know that I could.”

He glances across at her. “It’ll make it go by much more quickly.”

She shakes her head. Her free hand grips the edge of her seat. She clearly feels that this is quite quickly enough.

“Careful!”

He slams down a gear for a bend. They make the turn and hurtle on through the winter night. The darkness has become a solid thing and it’s racing away from his headlights, retreating from them as fast as he can drive towards it: he is chasing after the dark, and he will slam right through it, into whatever it is that lies beyond.

They burn through scattered dwellings that here and there coalesce into settlements, and there are lights sometimes, and the smell of woodsmoke, and then they’re in a square, where there are a few lights lit, which have a tired and faded look about them, and he knows that by the time they reach the next town everything will be shut. He’d prefer not to stop, but she must need some refreshment. He eases off and pulls over and yanks the handbrake on. She visibly relaxes.

“Two ticks,” he says. “Stay here and keep warm. I’ll go and see if I can rustle something up.”

He leaves the engine idling. In the café, the patron is locking up for the night, but seeing the man in Red Cross uniform there he starts to draw the bolts again and ushers him in, past the empty bentwood chairs set on the tabletops, into the end-of-evening smell of smoke and wine, which brings to mind a plate of charcuterie, the memory of Jeannine, and thence that priest, and that brings him out in gooseflesh. But they have nothing they can give him here. There will be viennoiseries in the morning, but until then, there’s only coffee and brandy to be had.

“That’ll work, thank you.”

He lights up, leaning on the zinc, twitchy, running a fingernail back and forth along a scratch. The patron fills the percolator, heats milk and reaches for the cognac on the almost-empty shelves. This place, this little café in this little town, the scar along the countertop — this is everything for the moment. While outside in the cold cab, breath pluming in the air, the snow gathering on the windscreen, the press of a hairpin into her scalp, is also everything. And the coffee bowls and brandy bottle lifted from the shelf, the other side of the zinc, the stubble-blued chin scrubbed at with a hand, is everything again. These small worlds, overlapping and impenetrable.

He returns to the cab with a coffee that is getting cooler and more dilute with snow. She has fallen into a doze. When he opens the door, she is startled awake.

“Thank you.” She lifts the drink to her lips and then, catching the scent, hesitates.

“Drop of brandy. Keep out the cold.”

“I don’t drink,” she says.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing else.”

She pulls a face.

“Consider it medicinal,” he says. If he could just take the bowl back, then they could be on their way. “For the good of your health.”

She hesitates, then drinks it straight down. She hands him the bowl. “Where will we stop for Mass?”

“Mass? Tonight?”

“It’s Christmas Eve.”

Of course it is. Of course. “I’ll get you to Saint-Lô in time.”

She grimaces.

—

He pulls to a halt outside the ruined church of Notre-Dame in Saint-Lô. She swallows queasily after the twisting, jolty journey here.

“All right?”

She fumbles with the door.

Inside the church, candles have been lit; they glow through the fragments of stained glass still clinging to the cames.

He turns the engine off and gets out to help her down, but she is already sliding from her seat. She straightens her skirt and settles her cape around her shoulders with a distinct air of relief.

“Well,” she says. “Here we are. Thank you.”

From inside the church comes the sound of violins, thin and icy. The snow still falls.

“Will you join me?”

He pulls on his cap. “I’ll wait on you here.”

He leans back against the truck.

She goes up the steps and in through the doorway. That’ll be an hour or so, Mass. He listens to the priest’s incantation and the low murmur of the congregation, and then the priest again. One doesn’t need to hear the actual words; the shape and pattern of them is instantly knowable. Her footprints fill. Snow gathers on his shoulders and his cap. He brushes it off and lights another cigarette. Violins begin to play, and then voices join them. Cigarette in lips, he treads over to the door to peer inside.

The church is open to the sky: the priest stands, vestments pulled over a bulky coat, bald head bowed, and snow falls on him. Snow carpets the stone flags, covers the altar with a blue-white pall. Snow drapes the edges of protruding masonry and the scorched and broken timbers. The candles flicker and fizz as the snowflakes hit them.

They are gathered there, all of them; they sing. The colonel, the volunteers, the ancillary workers, the new matron with her cap and cape. The Catholic contingent of the prisoners of war are with them in the snow. He thinks he catches the bristly profile of the German doctor. And the thin women from the ramshackle bawdy-house. And children, small ones held sleeping, older ones bundled up in jackets and scarves. Near the back, a youth with a small boy pressed into his side, heads tilted back to bawl out the hymn together.

It’s impressive, that conspiracy. That insistence that everything means something, that happenstance will be made to fit a pattern, for all that the pattern cannot be discerned from where they stand, human, their feet upon the earth. That everything must be referred upward, into the empty sky.

He turns away, back into the night, the snow falling. He gets back into the stuffy crampedness of the cab and finishes his cigarette. It’s a kind of homesickness, he suspects. But then he never entirely felt at home.

Movement at the cab door: she climbs back into the truck with a cloud of cold and thumps the door shut behind her.

“Beautiful,” she says. “Thank you.”

“Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

The engine clears its throat, and clears its throat again, uncertain: diesel doesn’t like the cold. But it settles into its phlegmy rattle and he stamps on the clutch.

“Not far now,” he says. “Just on up the road.”

He shoves the gearstick sideways, then shunts it forward; he releases the pedal and they lunge away again, through the broken town shawled in snow.

“You must be tired of ferrying people around at all hours.”

“I’ve put you through it tonight,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

He swerves round on to the road that leads up to the hospital; here the snow is worn to slush.

“Oh,” she says. “No.” She grips the door handle and the seat as they take the bend.

“My contract’s up. I’m afraid my mind’s elsewhere. And you wanted to get to Mass, so…”

He turns down the main drive, passes a row of huts. They pull up outside the women’s barracks.

“We shall be sorry to lose you, I’ve no doubt,” she says.

“The place is all set up now, so, they’re grand.”

“What will you do next?”

He yanks the handbrake on and clumps the gearstick back into neutral. “Start again,” he says. “I suppose. Just like everybody else.”

—

The white huts are almost pretty, with their curtained windows warm in the twilight, and he walks along the clean frosty pathways to where his lift is waiting for him.

There are footfalls indoors as the nurses do their rounds; there are murmured voices, there are those hard ungovernable coughs of the tubercular patients. He can hear the buzz of chat from the rec hut, the pock and tap of the table-tennis balls. He has made the necessary farewells. He doesn’t want to make any unnecessary ones, has no desire to linger.

He runs his tongue round his mouth, the gaps and the smooth places where the decay was halted and the voids were filled. The absence of pain is a thing in itself, though not painlessly achieved. Like this place, this scraped-clear bit of earth where the rubble has been brushed aside and something sound is made of it.

It’s temporary, of course; everything’s always temporary. Decay is paused, not halted; ruin is always incipient. One day, before you know it, all of this will be half-rotten, streaked with green and crawling with woodlice. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the doing.

The new matron steps out of the women’s ward and comes walking down the path towards him. Her eyes are tired but her expression is light; she actually looks happy. She sees him, kitbag and coat, heading to the cars.

“Are you going right away?” she asks.

“My lift’s waiting.”

“Hang on just two minutes before you go.” Her hand is on his arm, she is drawing him back.

She leads him into the women’s ward, up the step and indoors. One corner is curtained off. At the far end of the hut, a woman sleeps, curled on her side.

“Come, see.”

She eases back the curtain and there is a row of little cots. He knows these cots. He has an invoice filed away for them back up at the stores. In one, swaddled in white linen and tucked in tight under cellular blankets, is a tiny raw-looking thing, patched with flaking skin. Its birdlike breast barely lifts the covers, but it does lift the covers, and, as he watches, it keeps on doing so. Impossible tiny little breaths in a creature not yet used to breathing. A being not yet used to being.

“Is it all right?”

“Oh yes. Perfectly. He’s just a few hours old.”

“And the mother?”

The nurse nods, and in her smile is the knowledge of a job well done. “She’s doing fine.”

The infant stirs; its lips move. It doesn’t cry. Its eyes open, and they are dark and bluish and alien.

“It isn’t crying.”

“They don’t always cry,” Matron says.

He looks down at the small creased thing, which stares back at him with an ancient calm.

“They do keep on being born, don’t they?”

“Hm?”

“People. Babies.”

“They rather insist on it.”

“Poor little scrap,” he says.

“New life, though,” she says. “It gives you hope.”

“Oh, don’t say that,” he says. “That’s not fair.”

He considers the curled-up creature there, the years that it will have to live through, the best outcome at the end of it all. Why would you do that to someone, out of love? And aren’t they supposed to cry? When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. It’s just a natural reaction.

“Well,” he says. “God bless.”

A big, lovely smile from her, as if he has expressed some kind of approval, as if something has been agreed between them.

“God bless,” she says.

He shoulders his kitbag and slips out through the door. Hope is not a thing that he can bring himself to consider. It really does not agree with him at all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO PARIS, January 1946

“I’ll walk from here.”

He slides out at the corner, slams the door, raises a hand in thanks. The vehicle rattles away. There is ice between the cobblestones; there is frost on the railings. He turns his collar up. His coat now is worn to fit his body, it has softened to him. Made itself be his.

The street-market is busy on the rue de Vaugirard, but the stalls are thinly stocked. A few winter cabbages, half a barrow-load of potatoes, a pile of chestnuts; everything is sad and slight and mean-looking, and there is a conspicuous absence of bread, since it’s back on the ration. A few pewter-grey fish lie cold in the cold air. The housewives are pecking grimly through these offerings. He notices the prices chalked on the little boards and winces. It is going to be impossible to live on his allowance. It was stupid to walk away from a proper salary, ridiculous to leave behind the chickens and the Calvados and the jam and the nice warm little huts, to try again at this impossible thing that nobody cares whether he does or doesn’t do, and for which no payment is to be anticipated. It was stupid, impossible, ridiculous, and absolutely necessary.

He peers up the face of the apartment building. His little casement is unlit; behind it waits a pool of calm and quiet. If Suzanne is elsewhere. He goes in through the lobby door. The lift is still out of order; the stairs twist upward, into shadow. His head is too full to accommodate the possibility of her, to accommodate anything other than what has to happen next. The cupboard in the back of his mind is ready to burst open, and all the mess that has been shoved in there will spill out on to the floor. He has to have the space, the quiet, to let that happen, to deal with the mess, sort through it and shape it into something.

There is a strange push-pull to this, an urgency and a dread. He grabs the handrail, heaves himself up three steps at a time, striding his way up the spiralling helix. He can’t let himself think too much about the doing of it; it must just be done.

Suzanne halts two steps above him. She is fastening her glove. They are caught out by the suddenness of the encounter, their eyes locked. She is struck, again, by the brightness of the blue; he is caught by the warmth of her eyes, black-coffee-brown. Her gaze slides away, and she glances over his furrowed forehead, his furze of hair, his cold hand curled round the strap of his bag. She feels an instinctive tug towards him, but there is too much, just too much heaped up now between them. She can’t go over, she can’t go round, she can’t just blunder through.

“It’s you,” she says, and her voice sounds dry and strange.

“Yes, it’s me.”

She is rendered conscious of her stockings — her best pair, though darned at heel and toe. Her patchy pumiced legs. He has seen her worse. But he doesn’t see her now; she knows it. He is here, but she can tell that he isn’t really here at all.

“Well,” she says, and she doesn’t know what else to say.

He steps up and kisses her on the cheek. The smell of her, of old coat and body and a faint whiff of perfume, which she must have been eking out so carefully. If they could get back to where they left off, to that stupid lovely summer five years ago, when her body was sepia-printed from the sun and they had been easy together; if they could drag themselves back to that, claw their way along through mud and dust. But there is so much territory, so much cooling space between them. There is so much wear and tear.

No point pinning it with words, he thinks. Let it flutter by.

“You’re back,” she says.

He nods.

“And that’s that, is it?”

He says, “That’s that.”

There is maybe more that he could say, phrases he could conjure up and offer out to her that would help, but his eyes drift past her on and up the stairs, into the shadows.

“Good,” she says. “Well. I missed you.”

Then she just slips past him and goes on, clipping down and round the stair, going briskly. He watches. She turns again and she is gone. Her footfalls fade out, and the porte cochère opens and then slams behind her.

She pauses in the street. She touches her eyes with a gloved finger. There is time, she tells herself; they have been granted that, at least. But is more time really what they need?

The circling stairs twist up into the shadows. His chest aches; his scar hurts. Perhaps he should go after her. He hefts the bag strap up his shoulder and begins again to climb.

Inside, he drops his bag and locks the door behind him. The apartment is cold and dim. He unbuttons his greatcoat but keeps it on. He moves around the room, touching things into place, going into the kitchenette to set water to boil. He hunkers down by his bag to rummage out his notebook, a new bottle of ink, his fountain pen. The pan begins to rattle as he lays his materials out on the tabletop. He goes to make coffee, brings the things back through. He draws out the chair and sits. In silence and in solitude, he folds open his new notebook. He flattens out the page. He dips his pen into the ink, and fills it, and wipes the nib. The pen traces its way across the paper. Ink blues the page. Words form. This is where it begins.