A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker Page B

speaks in sudden English.
    “Do you think so?”
    “Well, it’d be a hell of a walk.”
    “Oh, he could walk it,” Suzanne says, and they are back in French. “He could walk the legs off a mule, you should see him walk, my God.” Suzanne lifts her glass; he looks to her, but she doesn’t catch his eye. He has offended her, it seems, but he doesn’t quite know how.
    “You don’t want to go to Spain.” This is Marcel again. “Bloody fascists.”
    Mary’s tone is emollient, explanatory: “I don’t think he is suggesting they settle there permanently.”
    Marcel tilts his head at this now. “America?”
    “Ireland,” he concedes.
    “Ah, you’re going home.”
    “I wouldn’t quite say that.”
    Suzanne looks up at him, his heron profile, his shadowed eyes. His spectacles have been tucked carefully away. He turns his head and meets her look with that startling blue gaze.
    “What would we do,” Suzanne asks, “in Ireland?”
    He shrugs. “We’d get by.”

    Suzanne looks at him, then down at her glass. She turns it round and round on the tabletop, watching the light caught there, the way it stays put no matter how much she twists the glass. Her cheeks feel hot.
    “Better off in America,” Marcel says. “Ireland won’t last. Not after England falls.”
    Mary gives him a look.
    “I’m telling you. America will be all that’s left. Anywhere else will just be more of the same, and it will be shit.”
    A bruised silence. Suzanne watches as Marcel drains his glass, and pours himself another drink, and starts talking about New York. He, though, has reverted to wordlessness; she can hear him breathing, and that is all; breathing, thinking, unfathomably thinking. While Marcel goes on: New York is the future; New York is where they should all be heading now; New York will soon be all that’s left of Europe.
    “I miss Paris,” Mary says lightly.
    “You’ll always miss Paris.” Marcel lifts his cigarette case from the tabletop. “From now on, all of us who ever gave a fig for it always will. Paris won’t be Paris any more. Paris can never truly be Paris again.”
    He, now, leans away from Marcel; he folds his arms, glances over to the chessboard.
    “Well, Paris is my home,” Mary says. “It’s where my books are.”
    “You can make more books,” Marcel says, over a huff of cigarette smoke. “You always do.”
    There’s a silence after this, and it extends just a little too long before Mary speaks again.
    “I’ll go see what’s holding dinner up.”
    She gets to her feet and pads off inside the house.
    —
    Later, the two of them walk home together along the promenade. She slips her bare arm through his; it is cool silk, and heavy.
    “Earlier, what you said about us going to Ireland.”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you mean it?”
    “I dare say.”

    “You said you couldn’t breathe there, couldn’t sleep, you couldn’t write.”
    He nods.
    “But you would go. We would go.”
    “If we had to. But, you know, you’d hate it there.”
    “You think so?”
    There is a long pause, in which their feet crunch along the sandy boards and the wind blows her hair into her eyes. She tucks it back behind her ear, looks at him sidelong, waiting for what might come.
    “I’m at a loss, to tell the truth,” he says. “There’s nowhere left to be.”
    They walk on, arm in arm, through the summer night and the sound of waves breaking on the shore. The world is ending, and it is exuberantly, ridiculously beautiful.
    —
    The year turns, and the shadows lengthen, and they do not go to Ireland, or even Spain. The Atlantic wind blows chill, and Mary and Marcel’s arguments heat up. America, Marcel says. America America America. New York. Mary just says Paris, and Home.
    But Marcel does not leave, and neither does Mary. Nobody leaves. Nobody goes anywhere at all. The bubble holds, shimmering in the end-of-summer cool.
    He, though, at least writes letters; he sends off enquiries and tries to find out what could