A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

writing.
    “Are you there?”
    She has spent a good deal of time on it. There is, as her mother would say, a lot of love gone into that rug.
    “I have a present for you.”
    There’s no reply. She stands, silent, listening to the empty apartment. Disappointed, she lays the rug over the arm of the settee, smoothing out the crocheted squares.
    He has left his notebook lying on the table. She stands looking at it.
    He will be back at any moment. She’ll make some coffee. She’ll give him the rug. They will have some time together, and she will leave him to get on with his work.
    She stands looking at the notebook. She doesn’t go to the kitchen. She moves closer to the table and touches the book; she lifts it. Her whole body’s alert for a foot on the stair, the creak of a board, the shift in sound as the main door opens from the street below, any hint of his return.

    It has never been forbidden, that she look at his work. But then, it shouldn’t need to be forbidden.
    She opens it.
    The pages separate on a mess; they’re thick with scribbles, scratchings-out.
    Her skin bristles in unease.
    She leafs back through to see what came before. The notebook is three-quarters full; the completed pages are densely covered. But every clear French phrase that has been achieved is barricaded all around by crossings-out and scribblings. He has filled pages, he has written his pen dry and refilled it, he has covered sheets and sheets, but very little is let stand. It seems that all that has been achieved here is the consumption of paper, ink and time.
    Baffled, she frowns down at the mess of it.
    The hours they’d spent in cafés, he and his friend Alfred, before Alfred joined up, going over this. And now the hours alone. And this is all there is to show for it.
    She turns another page. On the verso, he has drawn a little picture of Charlot, the tramp with his bowler hat coming down over his eyes, his toothbrush moustache like Adolf the peacemaker’s, his sagging trousers, his splayed feet in broken boots. What does he think he is doing? Why can’t he simply write? Why can’t he just get on with it?
    And then there’s a yell—from outside, in the street. She drops the book and turns to the window, peers down at a scuffle. Is that him? He doesn’t have his papers, oh my God, they’ll lock him up.
    And then she sees the ball.
    Just a kickabout in the street. Her fear contracts. A bad-tempered game, all elbows and shoving. The ball is sent spinning crosswise on to the pavement, where Monsieur Lunel shuffles along under his black fedora, his body foreshortened by the angle, and one of the lads runs over and scoops up the ball and apologizes, and another comes up and up and stands too close to the old man, his skinny chest puffed out—she can’t hear what he says from up here—and spits upon the ground. Then his mate shoves him, and there’s another scuffle, and the ball bounces off the cobbles, and they chase after it, and Monsieur Lunel, after standing frozen for a moment, shuffles on.

    This is what they don’t see, the Amerloques and the Irlandais, the writers and the artists and the wives who come here for the cheap living and the cheap wine and the distance from their mothers, all his fly-by-night friends. They skate over the shining surface; they don’t see the murk beneath.
    She peels her forehead from the window, rubs the mark with a sleeve and turns away. She sees the notebook lying there on the tabletop. How exactly had he left it?
    She meets him at the door and gives him quick kisses, one cheek and then the other. He has brought a parcel home with him; he drops it on the settee. She hands him a cup, laughs at herself—a tussle in the street, I thought they were arresting you! She shows him the rug that she made for him, though it has already lost half its loveliness: she had thought that they were both, in their own ways, working on the same thing. On his success.
    “What’s in the parcel?” she asks.
    He