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

touches the rug, pressing a little moss-coloured square of wool with his fingertips. “This is very nice. Thank you.”
    He takes the parcel over to the table and lays it down to open it. “It was left with the concierge.” She sees him notice the notebook. “Have you been here long?” he asks.
    “No,” she says, a shade too quickly. “Not long. What’s in the parcel?” she asks again.
    “Soon find out.”
    He opens a drawer and slides the notebook in. Then he turns the package over so that he can get at the knots. The bundle is soft and bulky and he has already noted Nora’s girlish handwriting, but he can’t make sense of it at all. He undoes the knot, tugs the string away and unfurls the waxy paper. Inside there is a bolt of dark twill. He still can’t make sense of it. And then he sees. He lifts it out. It is a coat.
    “A coat,” she says.
    It brings with it a cloud of scent: pomade, cheroot smoke and lemon soap. A cloud of associations, of time dispensed in cafés and books and drink, the gut-punch of guilt about Lucia. A note tumbles from the folds and lands on the floor. He stoops for it and peers, holding it close up to his face to read. This from the man himself.

    “Who’s it from?”
    “Mr. Joyce.”
    For all of everything, this is what he’s worth. He gets to wear the great man’s cast-off coat.
    “Oh,” she says. “Well. That’s handy.”
    He folds the coat and lays it in the paper, and fumbles it all back together again. He sits down. He takes out pen and paper.
    “What are you doing?”
    “A thank-you note.”
    “Ah.”
    His hand flicks across, leaving loops and curls of blue behind it, then whisking down to traverse the page again. The white swiftly fills with clean blue. Her lips bunch and twist. She turns and moves away to the little kitchenette, where she rummages irritably in the cupboards, drags out tins and packets, shoves them back. She feels as though she has been taken for a fool.

CHAPTER FOUR
    L’EXODE
    June 1940
    Anxiety makes the air thick; the urgency is a dream urgency, where there is a desperate need to run and yet the limbs are heavy and entangled. The earth shudders when the bombs hit. The sky is greasy with smoke.
    The ticket officer doesn’t look up. “Where do you want to go?”
    They’ve been queuing for hours; they’re footsore and twitchy to be gone. He has two bags and she has her backpack. Trains have arrived with their plumes of steam and they’ve left with their plumes of steam, and the concourse remains congested still, suitcases drawn into little settlements with joggled babies and fractious kids and tired old women, and the queue weaves round and through it all, a ragged line of anxious faces and sweated-through summer clothes; it has been skin-crawlingly slow progress to get even as far as the ticket desk. It has been an age. And not once in all that age did it occur to him that this might come up. The only thought so far has been Away.
    “There’s a choice?”
    The ticket officer looks up now. “Well, no. But people tend to say, and then I tell them what I can give them.” The fellow glances past them at the never-ending queue. “It’s usually over quite briskly.”

    Suzanne huffs in irritation. He touches her arm. “So, what can you give us?”
    “There’s a train for Vichy in a couple of hours.”
    “Vichy…” He turns to Suzanne. She nods, whisks a hand to hurry things along. The old spa town will do; anywhere will do; anywhere away from here.
    “It’s a four-hour journey, under normal circumstances,” the ticket officer says. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.”
    A thought leaps up: Joyce is now at Vichy. They’d shifted there from Saint-Gérand-le-Puy; there was a postcard from an hotel, the Hotel…Beaujolais. Maybe they could get a room there themselves. So they’ll go to Vichy and they’ll see Joyce, and it’s a feeling something like home. A little landslip of images: white wine and talk, and together