A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker Page A

tight to the handrail, like an old woman. He is still worried about her.
    The shop below sells religious paraphernalia. It is populated with plaster saints. Christ hangs, his ivory flesh crucified over and over again, all around the walls. Sacred hearts flicker in the light of their little candle. This is the deus ex machina by which they have been saved.
    They huddle down behind the counter, backs to the panelling, the counter-top a narrow ceiling above them. The little shop is riddled with draughts. He fumbles a borrowed blanket over her shoulders, draws the other up over his knees. They sit shivering side by side. There’s a steady drip from the blocked guttering and the tumbling rush of water down the street outside. He huffs out the candle and the saints blink out of sight. In the darkness, she huddles closer, her face pressed into the covers. Her voice comes muffled through the blanket.
    “It smells of feet.”
    “Want me to turn it round?”
    She shakes her head.
    After a while, she says, “I’m so cold.”
    He fumbles his blanket loose and lays it over her knees too. Stiff, she pulls her blanket out in a wing and slides it behind his shoulder, draping it round him.
    “Well,” he says. “This is not so bad.”
    She tuts.
    “You’ll be missing your lovely bench, then, and the rain?”
    He can just about make her out in the light from the street: her white face, beautiful and alien as those plaster saints. He should never have burdened her with him; he should never have let her make herself a part of what he did. Her head sinks down to rest on her knees.

    “You see, you’ve got these great long legs,” she mumbles. “And mine are only short.”
    The warmth gathers between them; their outer edges are still cold. Blinks slow; breath softens. Now and then there is a shiver. In the hallucinatory slip towards sleep, it seems to him that the statues swell and shrink with breath. Blood wells from wounds and drips, drips, drips. And below, on the bare floorboards, human bodies share the almost nothing that they have, and go on living.

CHAPTER FIVE
    ARCACHON
    Summer 1940
    The waves creep up and crash on the far side of the rue de la Plage. The breeze is cool from the Atlantic and takes the sting out of the sun. The two men sit on the terrace, under the shade of an awning. Their hands are brown as they reach to lift and shift the veined marble and speckled granite pieces.
    It has been—who would deny it?—a beautiful summer, full of ugly news.
    Studying the chessboard, a cigarette smouldering between his knuckles, he tries to conjure all the futures he and Marcel Duchamp might summon up between them here. Marcel lifts a piece, and sets it down, and a web of potentiality collapses and falls away to dust: the future refines itself. He follows threads of possibility. He thinks.
    Marcel tweaks the brim of his white straw hat low, to shade his eyes. Mary reads on the sunlounger, soft-limbed and tanned, and every so often he hears her sigh and turn a page.
    He takes a long drag on his cigarette, and lets the smoke go, and lifts his knight.
    When Suzanne joins them, after her swim, all slicked wet hair and lean tan, Mary looks up with a smile and sets her book aside. Drinks are proposed and the game put in abeyance till the following day. The stone figures cast long shadows as the sun sinks, and everything is softened by the Charentais-pink light. They drink and talk and laugh and it is all apparently quite lovely. But it is also a bubble. Everybody knows that it can’t last.

    “There is Spain, of course; we could go to Spain.”
    “Why would you go to Spain?”
    “A friend of mine’s in the British Consulate there. And it’s not far.”
    “That’s no reason to go anywhere. You don’t want to go to Spain. Spain will be shit.”
    “Marcel!”
    “Sorry. My apologies. The ladies’ tender ears, et cetera. But it will be shit. You know it will.”
    “You’d need a car to get to Spain.” Mary turns to him,