A Country Road, A Tree Read Online Free PDF Page B

find the round limestone pebble from the shore at Greystones, smooth and cool as a mint between his fingertips. He lifts the stone and slips it between his lips. He watches his feet swing out ahead of him in his scuffed-up, exhausted boots, and sucks on the stone, while music rises and swells inside his head, the sad loveliness of the Winterreise.
Wundlicher Alter!
Sol lich mit dir geh’n?
    He has an answer for his mother now, at least: no use whatsoever.

CHAPTER THREE
    PARIS
    Winter 1939–40
    Alfy is made strange by uniform, his flesh somehow transfigured, made more solid; his kepi rests on the café table, between the half-empty glasses, beside the half-full ashtray. His fingers play with a coaster, a cigarette smokes between his knuckles. He keeps his voice low and his eyes averted, as if he is himself abashed by his new state, by the thick green greatcoat around his barrel body. He is doing what he can do. He has enlisted. The professor will be shovelling out the stables for the cavalry.
    Cavalry. It makes his eyes fall shut, his head shake in slow negation, just to hear it, just to think of it, obsolescent, an insane word for a modern war. For dear Christ’s sake: cavalry. It may as well be Calvary, for the sacrifice and slaughter that shadow it.
    “I wanted to ask you,” Alfy’s saying. “While I’m gone, if you could keep an eye out for the family, for Mania and the boys.”
    “Of course.”
    “I know,” Alfy says. “I know you would anyway. I just needed to say the words. And if I don’t come back…”
    “Ah God now, Alfy, don’t.”

    “Because it doesn’t look good, if we are to be honest about it.” Alfy tilts his head, taps his ash into the ashtray. “So. If I don’t come back…”
    “Alfy, no—”
    “Consider them family, would you? Mania and the boys. That’s all I wanted to say. Would you do that for me, if I don’t come back?”
    “Of course. Count on it. But do me a favour too.”
    “Anything, my friend.”
    “Come back.”
    Alfy flashes his big grin; they part with a hand clasp, a kiss on the cheek. At the street corner he glances back at the stocky, uniformed figure, and his throat aches at the parting.
    Alfred, his old friend, his new brother, leaves for his regiment; he, though, returns to his notebooks, to his desk, this pointless, circular work. Maybe he should try to enlist. He could shovel dung as well as anyone. It would be more worthwhile than this.
    —
    His friends drift.
    Rootless anyway, the winds make hay with them; they are bundled up and off, tumbling and in disarray. They come and go; you wouldn’t know where anyone would be.
    The Joyces are back, James and Nora arriving at the station in a noisy huddle cluttered round with bags and cases. Both he and Paul Léon are there to meet them, to help, but still it is all short temper and frayed nerves, bloody-mindedness and frailty. Mr. Joyce with his smouldering cheroot and his stick and his dark glasses, questions for Léon about what’s going on with Giorgio, enquiries about books: the man is entirely disengaged from the moment and its imperatives. Nora’s complaining is a constant exhalation like the steam engine. They have been in Brittany to make arrangements for their daughter, to see her settled out of harm’s way. Though whether harm’s way can ever be quite avoided by Lucia is uncertain, since she carries so much harm around inside herself.
    Léon goes in search of a porter and they head towards the cabs. Following the bickering couple, his own face flushes at the recollection of fractured, thwarted Lucia. His blunt failure at love.

    He and Paul get them settled in the cab and then return across the concourse, heading for the Métro.
    “They are to pack up the apartment, do you know?” Paul says. “Nora insists on an hotel.”
    Paul is so benign, so mild, and yet there is a sweet one-upmanship to this; an almost-schoolboy I know something you don’t know.
    “Switzerland, then,” he says,