Arthur McCash’s gestures were what I would call “English Nervous.” As he talked, I watched him move his water glass, a fork, an empty ashtray, and the butter dish several times. It told me how quickly his brain was firing and it was clear the movement of those obstacles helped slow him down.
I said nothing. I did not wish him to know what I had been discovering on my own. He was a dutiful official and lived by the rules.
“She stayed away from the two of you because she was fearful you might be linked to her, they would use her to somehow strike at you. Turned out she was right. She was rarely in London, but she’d just been recalled.”
“My father?” I said quietly.
There was barely a pause. He just made a dismissive gesture suggesting fate.
He paid the bill and at the door we shook hands. There was an emphasis in his goodbye as if it was permanent and we two would not meet again like this. Years ago at Victoria Station, he had approached me in a way almost too close for comfort and bought me a cup of tea in the cafeteria. I had not known then that he was my mother’s colleague. Now he walked from me at a quick pace, as though relieved to get away. I still had no inkling about his life. We had circled each other for a long time. This man, content to be silent about his bravery the night he had saved us, when my mother returning into my life had touched my shoulder, and using my old nickname, said “Hello, Stitch.” Then went quickly towards him, opening his bloodied white shirt, interrogating him about the blood.
Whose blood is it?
It’s mine. Not Rachel’s.
Under McCash’s dazzling white shirts would always be the scars, reminders of the time he had protected me and my sister. But now I knew he had kept our mother informed about us, had been her secret camera at Ruvigny Gardens. Just as The Moth, as Rachel said, had cared for us more than I realized.
I thought back to a weekend when The Moth and I had stood at the edge of the Serpentine watching Rachel stride into the water towards something she wished to rescue, lifting her dress, her bare legs meeting her upside-down body. Was it a piece of paper? A bird with a broken wing? It doesn’t matter. What was important was that when I glanced over at The Moth, I saw he was watching Rachel intensely, not just for what she herself was, but with a permanent concern for her. And all through that afternoon I recalled Walter—let us call him Walter now—had stared at anyone who came near us as if there might be some flaw of danger. There must have been days—all those times when I was not with them while busy with The Darter—when The Moth’s eyes were focused on Rachel, in this protective way.
But now I knew that Arthur McCash had been a guardian too, coming by once or twice a week to keep an eye on us. But what I felt towards him as he walked away after our dinner was what I felt when I was fifteen. He was still that solitary presence, recently down from Oxford with his infamous limerick and with no sense of an authentic landscape behind him. Though if I had inquired about his school days, I am sure he could have described the colours on his school scarf or his boardinghouse, probably named after some English explorer. In fact, at times Ruvigny Gardens still feels to me like an amateur theatre company where a man named Arthur rushes on to perform his awkward conversations and when that is over walks off into—what? It was a role scripted for him, the minor character, and it led eventually to him being sprawled on a backstage sofa at the Bark Theatre with blood filling his white shirt and soaking the top of his trousers. A moment that had to remain classified, off stage.
But the tableau of that night keeps returning: my mother moving towards him, dragging a chair with her, the weak wattage of the one lamp in the room, and her beautiful neck and face bending down to kiss his cheek briefly.
“Can I help, Arthur?” I hear her say. “A doctor will come….”
“I’m all right, Rose.” She looks over her shoulder at me, unbuttons his shirt, pulls it loose from his trousers to discover how serious the knife slashes are, slides the cotton scarf off her neck to swab the welling blood. Reaches for the vase.
“He didn’t stab me.”
“Slashes. I see that. Where is Rachel now?”
“She’s all right,” he says. “She’s with Norman Marshall.”
“Who’s that?”
“The Darter,” I say across the room. And she turns to look at me again as if surprised there is something I know that she doesn’t.
A WORKING MOTHER
I traced the trail of my mother’s swift departure from Intelligence after her return, as she severed all connections then moved with no fanfare to Suffolk, while Rachel and I completed our last years at far-flung schools. So having had no mother during the time when she worked in Europe, we now had no mother during the period that followed, as she evolved back into being an anonymous civilian, erasing her false names.
I came across memos, from after she had left the Service, warning her that the name Viola had cropped up again in a recent document, and there was the possibility that those who had been searching for her had not given up. She responded by refusing the proposal of “bodies from London” to protect her, deciding instead to find someone outside her professional circle to watch over the safety, not of her, but of her son when he was with her. Therefore, unknown to me, she persuaded the local market gardener, Sam Malakite, to visit our house and offer me a job. No one from my mother’s former universe was invited into our surroundings.
I had no suspicions that people were still searching for a Rose Williams, and I was unaware of the protection I was being given. It was only after her death that I discovered she always surrounded her children—even Rachel in her distant Welsh landscape—with various guardian owls. So Arthur McCash had been replaced by Sam Malakite, a market gardener who never carried a weapon, unless you considered his three-pronged hand shovel or his hedging tools.
I recall asking my mother once what had made her begin to like Mr. Malakite, for it was clear she was very fond of him. She was on her knees in the garden attending to nasturtiums and she leaned back, looking not at me but into the distance. “I must say, it was when he interrupted a conversation we were having to say, ‘I think I smell cordite.’ Perhaps it was the casual, unexpected word in the remark that pleased me so. Or energized me. It was a branch of knowledge I was familiar with.”
But for me, that teenager, Sam Malakite represented only details from the world he lived in. I never imagined him as part of the world of arson or cordite. He was the most easygoing and stable person I’d encountered. For excitement on Wednesdays, on the way to work we picked up the four-page news sheet that was printed privately by the Reverend Mint, the pastor, who saw himself as the local Kilvert. The man did little for the community but give one sermon a week to a congregation of around twenty people. But there was his newspaper. His sermon and the newspaper forcibly dovetailed any local incidents into a moral parable. Someone having a fainting spell in the bakery, a telephone ringing constantly at the corner of Adamson Road, the stealing of a carton of wine gums from the confectionery, the misuse of the word “lay” on the radio—these worked their way into the sermon and then again into The Mint Light, with spiritual content hanging on for dear life.
In The Mint Light, an attack from Mars would have been ignored. This had even been its policy between 1939 and 1945, when it recorded mostly local complaints such as the presence of rabbits in the victory gardens. Thursday, 12:01 a.m., a police officer felt “emotional” during a thunderstorm while making his last patrol of the night. Sunday, 4:00 p.m., a female motorist was flagged down by a man carrying a ladder. By the time of the Sunday sermon, the borrowing of a ladder without permission or a schoolboy’s shining of a torch at a neighbour’s cat, “attempting to hypnotise it with a swaying and circular motion,” had profound biblical overtones, the hypnotized cat easily linked to Saint Paul being blinded by rays on the way to Damascus. We bought The Mint Light and read sections aloud in ominous tones, nodding wisely
and simultaneously rolling our eyes. Mr. Malakite believed his own death as the town’s market gardener would be linked to the feeding of the five thousand. No one read The Mint Light more carefully than we did. Except, strangely, my mother. When Mr. Malakite drove me home on Wednesdays, she always invited him in for tea and fish-paste sandwiches, took The Mint Light from him, and withdrew on her own to a desk. She read it without any laughter, and I realize now that my mother was searching not for the absurd spiritual metaphors but to discover if there was any reference to a possible stranger in the vicinity. She tended to see no one but Mr. Malakite, or now and then the postman. She even insisted on having no pets. As a result there was a feral cat who lived outside and a rat who lived indoors.
My nomadic school life had made me tactful as well as self-sufficient, not fond of confrontations. I avoided the schwer. I retreated from arguments as if I had those epicanthic eyelids that birds and some fish have, that allow them to separate themselves silently, almost courteously, from present company. I shared with my mother a preference for privacy and solitude. A room without argument and a sparse table appealed to both of us.
Only in our habits of clothing was there a difference. My journeying from place to place had made me responsible for my neatness. Something like ironing my own clothes gave me a sense of control. Even for working in the fields with Mr. Malakite I washed and ironed what I wore. Whereas my mother would hang a blouse to dry on a nearby bush, then simply put it on. If there was scorn in her towards my fussiness she said nothing; perhaps she did not even notice it. But when we sat across a table from each other I was conscious of her lean, clear-eyed face above an unironed shirt that she felt was good enough for the evening.
She surrounded herself with silence, barely listened to the radio unless there was a dramatic adaptation of something like Precious Bane or Lolly Willowes, those classics she’d read as a teenager. Never the news. Never political commentary. She could have been in a world that existed twenty years earlier, when her parents lived at White Paint. This vacuum-like silence only emphasized the distance between the two of us. In one of the few no-holds-barred arguments with my mother, when I complained about our abandonment, she responded too quickly, “Well, Olive was around you for a while. She kept me up-to-date.”
“Wait a minute—Olive? You knew Olive Lawrence?”
She drew back, as if she’d revealed too much.
“The eth-nog-ra-pher? You knew her?”
“She was not just an ethnographer, Stitch!”
“What else was she?”
She said nothing.
“Who else? Who else did you know?”
“I kept in touch.”
“Wonderful. You kept in touch. For your sake! I am so glad. You left us without a word. Both of you.”
“I had work to do. I had responsibilities.”
“Not to us! Rachel hates you so much she will not even talk to me. Because I’m here with you she hates me too.”
“Yes, I have been damned, by my daughter.”
I picked up the plate in front of me and flung it underhand viciously towards a wall as if that would finish our conversation. Instead the plate arced up, hit the edge of the cupboard, and broke, and a section of it leapt twisting towards her and cut into her forehead just above her eye. Then the noise of it falling to the floor. There was a pause, we were both still, blood coursed down the side of her face. I moved towards her but she held up her hand to keep me away, as if in scorn. She stood there impassive, stern, not even putting her hand up to her forehead to search out the wound. Just continued holding that palm out against me, to stop me from approaching, to stop me attempting to care for her, as if this was nothing. There had been worse. It was the same kitchen where I’d witnessed the series of wounds on her arm.
“Where did you go? Just tell me something.”
“Everything changed the night when I was with you and Rachel here at White Paint, when we listened to the bombers flying over us. I needed to be involved. To protect you. I thought it was for your safety.”
“Who were you with? How did you know Olive?”
“You liked her, didn’t you…? Anyway, she was not only an ethnographer. I remember one time when she was with a group of meteorologists in gliders scattered over the English Channel. Scientists had been working all week recording wind speeds and air currents, and Olive was up there too, in the sky, forecasting the oncoming weather and the chance of rain to confirm or postpone the D-Day invasion. She was involved with other things too. But that’s enough.”
Her hand was still up, as if giving evidence, something she did not want to do. Then she turned round, bent down, and washed the blood off in the sink.
* * *
—
She began leaving books out for me, mostly novels she had read at college before marrying my father. “Oh, he was a great reader….That’s what probably brought us together…at first.” There were a great many Balzac paperbacks in French around the house, and I knew these were her passion. She seemed no longer interested in whatever the intrigues were in the outside world. Only someone like Balzac’s fictional character Rastignac interested her. I don’t think I interested her. Though perhaps she felt she ought to influence me in some way. But I don’t think she necessarily wanted my love.
Chess was her suggestion, a sort of metaphor, I suppose, for our intimate battle, and I shrugged in agreement. She turned out to be a surprisingly good teacher in the careful way she laid down the rules and movements of the game. She never proceeded to the next stage until she was sure I understood what I had just been taught. If I reacted with impatience, she began again—I couldn’t fool her with a nod of understanding. It was incessantly boring. I wanted to be out in the fields. And at night I couldn’t sleep because strategic pathways began suggesting themselves to me in the dark.
After my first lessons we started playing and she beat me mercilessly, then repositioned the fatal pieces to show how I could have escaped a threat. There were suddenly about fifty-seven ways to walk across an empty space, as if I were a cat with twitching ears entering an unknown lane. She spoke constantly as we played, either to distract me, or to say something crucial about focus, her role model being a famous chess victory of 1858 that was given the title “Opera” since it had actually been played in a private box overlooking a performance of Bellini’s Norma. It was music my mother loved, and the American chess player, an opera enthusiast himself, had glanced now and then at the action on stage while playing against a French count and a German duke who continually and loudly discussed their moves against him. The point my mother was making was about distraction. Priests were being bribed and murdered on stage and central characters would eventually be burned on a pyre, and all the while the American chess and opera enthusiast remained focused on the strategic path he’d chosen, undeterred by the glorious music. It was my mother’s example of peerless focus.
One night a thunderstorm perched at the top of our valley as we sat poised across from each other at a table in the greenhouse. There was a sodium lamp near us. My mother set up pawns and castles at their starting gates as the storm gradually rolled over us. The lightning and thunder made us feel defenceless within the thin glass shell. Outside, it could have been Bellini’s opera; inside, there was the drugged air of plants, and two bars of electrical heat attempting to warm the room. We moved our pieces in the faint constant yellow of the sodium lamp. I was playing her well, in spite of the distractions. My mother in her blue cardigan smoked, barely looking at me. All that August there had been storms, and then in the morning clear, fresh daylight, as if a new century. Focus, she’d whisper as we sat down within the storm’s gunfire and flare lights to another of our small contests of will. In a quarter second of lightning I saw her fall briefly into the wrong trench of the battle. I saw the obvious move I had been left, but then another that was wrong or that might be even better. I played it r
ight away and she saw what I had done. The noise was all round us but now we both simply listened to it. A flood of lightning lit the greenhouse and I saw her face, her expression of—what? Surprise? A sort of joy?
So finally, a mother and a son.
* * *
—
If you grow up with uncertainty you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own. So it took me a long time to rely on the past, and reconstruct how to interpret it. There was no consistency in how I recalled behaviour. I had spent most of my youth balancing, keeping afloat. Until, in my late teens, Rose Williams sat in a greenhouse and in the artificial heat of it played vicious competitive chess with her son, the only one of her two children who agreed to stay with her. Sometimes she wore a dressing gown that revealed her frail neck. Sometimes her blue cardigan. She’d lower her face into it so I could see just her distrusting eyes, tawny hair.
“Defence is attack.” Said more than once. “The first thing a good military leader knows is the art of retreating. It’s important how you get in and then how you get out undamaged. Hercules was a great warrior, but he died violently at home in a coat of poison, because of his earlier heroism. It’s an old story. The safety of your two bishops, for instance, even if you sacrifice your queen. No—don’t! Well, you played that, so this is what I do. An opponent will punish you for little mistakes. This will checkmate you in three moves.” And before she moved her knight, she leaned forward and tousled my hair.
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