Free A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker Page A

closer, but then instead Madame darts forward, relieves him of the letter, opens it, retrieves spectacles from a pocket, helps her husband on with them. Her silence is a kindness; it softens her husband’s, makes it less stark. She hands Larbaud the unfolded sheet; he holds it left-handed; he peers through thick lenses, while she looks off and away, leaving him to read privately.
    Larbaud’s expression as he reads is itself unreadable behind those shining lenses. He turns away too, towards the high windows, and endures the silence and the shame. The husband passes the letter up again to his wife’s smooth hands. There’s a look, a touch between them. She glances over the letter. She murmurs a few words to Larbaud and he nods. Then she refolds the paper and slips it back into its envelope as she moves over to his desk.
    “We should like to help you.”
    He swallows. “Thank you.”
    “How much do you need? Not just to resolve your current troubles, but to see you on to wherever you are going?”
    He shakes his head, not in negation, but because he has no answer for her. It’s a calculation that he cannot make, and a gratitude that is beyond articulation.
    —
    The money is a thick pad in his breast pocket. His throat is thick too, as he goes with her down the hallway. Their footsteps syncopate.

    She opens the door for him. She smiles.
    “Thank you,” he says again. The words are entirely insufficient, but they are all he has.
    “It’s a little thing,” she says.
    It is not a little thing at all. “I shall return the money to you as soon as possible.”
    “Well, don’t make things difficult for yourself.” And then she says, “Good luck to you, Monsieur, and good courage.”
    She closes the door on him; he catches a glimpse of her face as it turns away, back to that closed room, and the silent man in the wheelchair, and the wordlessness.
    Don’t make things difficult for yourself.
    He stands there in the blue evening. He lets a breath go. They are saved. For the time being.
    He lights up a cigarette and sets off back through the cool residential streets. A proper meal, he realizes, is now possible. He peers in through café windows as he passes, at the neatly laid tables, at the soft old ladies already poking at their salads there. He and Suzanne will find a nice little place; they’ll have dinner tonight. They’ll sleep in a decent bed, and then tomorrow set out again, into whatever follows. They’ll head for—well, for the coast, for Arcachon, if that is possible, if Suzanne is willing to give it a try. They have, after all, an invitation there. And underneath everything is a taint of unease. He is ashamed, he does not deserve; why him, why should he be saved?
    On the wider roads and avenues there are carts and cabs lining up along the pavements. The lobby of the Beaujolais is filled with piled bags and trunks, with anxious, tired women settling their bills, with drooping children, and old men monopolizing the chairs.
    —
    And you must come and see us there, at Arcachon. It will be a long summer if you do not come.
    But the station at Vichy is closed to passengers; it is rammed with government traffic and only official travellers are allowed through. If they are heading west, to the coast, they should try one of the stations further down the line. Gannat, say; that’s probably their best bet.

    “Is there a bus to Gannat?”
    A blowing-out of the lips, a shake of the head: who’s to say?
    And so they walk. Bags on back, on shoulder and on hip. Through the town, and then the suburbs, and then out of Vichy itself, the mountains rising fat and green ahead of them, the streams bumbling under ancient stone arches below.
    “How far now?”
    “A little less far than when you asked before.”
    The day is soft and cool and there is a springtime feel to it, and there are people strung out in little clots all along the road, as though they were setting out on a pilgrimage. Little traffic passes: the odd