Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  She wakes at first light and walks into his adjoining room. Felon is asleep in the more modest bed he has chosen. He insisted when they arrived that she take the grander room. He is on his back, eyes shut, hands at his sides, as if praying or tied to a mast. She draws back the high, heavy curtains so the room fills with wintry light and furniture, but he does not wake. She watches him, conscious of him now in some other world, perhaps as the uncertain boy he was in his teens. She has never met Felon as an uncertain person: it is the remade man she knows. He has shown her over the years the great vistas she desired; but she thinks now that perhaps the truth of what is before you is clear only to those who lack certainty.

  She moves through the brocaded room of the hotel. She has not taken her eyes off him, as if they are in the middle of a mimed conversation they have never had. There has been this long twinned story between them, and she is no longer sure how to remain still allied to him. A Paris hotel. She will remember the name always, or perhaps she will need to forget it. In the bathroom she washes her face to clear her thoughts. She sits on the edge of the bathtub. If she has imagined his courtship of her, she has also imagined hers.

  She returns to his room, watching for any small movement in him, in case this is false sleep. Pauses, realizes that if she leaves now she will never be sure. Slips off her shoes and moves forward. Lowers herself onto the bed and stretches out beside him. My ally, she thinks. She remembers small particles of their history she will never be able to let go of, some forgotten whisper of confidence, some grip of his hand, a recognition across a room, him dancing with an animal in a field, how he learned to speak clearly and slowly on The Naturalist’s Hour so his near-deaf mother could understand him during those Saturday afternoons, how he knotted and bit the fine nylon when he completed that blue-winged olive nymph. When she was eight. When he was sixteen. That was only the first layer. There were more private depths. Him lighting a stove in a cold, dark cottage. The almost silent notes of a cricket. Then, later, him in a hut in Europe, standing up, leaving Hardwick asleep on the hut floor. All the scars on her arm he has not seen. She rolls onto her side to look at his face. Then she will leave. This is where you are, she thinks.

  * * *

  So much left unburied at the end of a war. My mother returned to the house built in an earlier century, which still signalled its presence over the fields. This had never been a hidden place. You could make out its whiteness almost a mile away as you listened to the rustle of pines surrounding you. But the house itself was always silent, a fold in the valley protecting it. A place of solitude, with water meadows sloping to the river, and where if you stepped outside on a Sunday you might still hear the bell from a Norman church miles away.

  Rose’s most insignificant confession to me during our last days together may have been the most revealing. It was about this house she had inherited. She ought to have chosen a different landscape, she said. Her wish for disinheritance or exile had been proclaimed years earlier when she separated herself from her parents, hiding from them what she was doing during the war, and becoming unknown even to her children. Now her return to White Paint was, I assumed, what she wanted. But it was an old house. She knew each slight incline of hall, every stiff window casing, the noise of winds during different seasons. She could have walked blindfolded through its rooms into the garden and stopped with assurance an inch from a lilac. She knew where the moon hung each month, as well as which window to view it from. It was her biography since birth, her biology. I think it drove her mad.

  She accepted it not just as safety or assurance, but as fate, even that loud noise from the wooden floor, and the realization of this shook me. It was built in the 1830s. She would open a door and find herself in her grandmother’s life. She could witness the generations of women in their labours with a husband’s visit now and then, and child after child, cry after cry, wood fire after wood fire, the bannister smoothed from a hundred years of touch. Years later I would come across a similar awareness in the work of a French writer. “I thought about it some nights till it almost hurt…saw myself preceded by all those women, in the same bedrooms, the same twilight.” She had witnessed her mother in such a role when her father was at sea, or in London returning only on weekends. This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe that included few outsiders—a family of thatchers working on the roof, the postman, or Mr. Malakite arriving with sketches for the greenhouse he was building.

  * * *

  —

  I asked my mother—it was probably the most personal question I asked her—“Do you see yourself in me at all?”

  “No.”

  “Or do you think I might be like you?”

  “That is of course a different question.”

  “I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the same.”

  “No, it isn’t. I suspect there might be a similarity and connection. I’m distrustful, not open. That may be true of you. Now.”

  She had gone way beyond what I was considering. I was thinking of something such as courtesy or table manners. Though her present solitary life had not made her courteous. She had little interest in what others were up to, as long as they left her alone. As for table manners, she’d shaved the consumption of meals down to an aerodynamic minimum: one plate, one glass, with the table wiped clean ten seconds after the roughly six-minute meal was over. Her daily path through the house was so ingrained a habit she was unaware of it unless it was interrupted. A conversation with Sam Malakite. Or a long walk into the hills while I was working with him. She felt protected by what she believed was her total insignificance and anonymity to those in the village, while within the house there was the nightingale floor—that landmine of noises which would signal any intruder entering her territory. Her nightingale in the sycamore.

  But that eventual stranger she expected never stepped indoors.

  “Anyway, why?” She now insisted on continuing our small conversation. “What were you thinking could have been the same between the two of us?”

  “Nothing,” I said smiling. “I thought perhaps table manners, or some other recognizable habit?”

  She was surprised. “Well, my parents always said, as everyone’s parents probably did, ‘Someday you may be eating with the king, so watch your manners.’ ”

  Why had my mother chosen to alight on just those two thin branches she saw as questionable skills or weaknesses in herself? “Distrustful” and “not open.” I understand now how she might have needed to learn those qualities in order to protect herself in her work, as well as in her marriage to a destructive and disappearing man. So she broke out from her chrysalis and slipped away to work with Marsh Felon, who had broadcast those seeds of temptation when she was young. His was the faultless campaign of a Gatherer. He had waited, drawing her into the Service in much the same way he himself had been drawn in, almost innocently. Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved. “Oh, I don’t want to be just worshipped!” as Olive Lawrence had announced once to Rachel and me.

  We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time. It is easier to understand the mercurial, unreliable relationship that existed between Rose and Marsh Felon. As for the story of my mother and her husband, that ghost in her story, I have only the image of him sitting in that uncomfortable iron chair in our garden, lying about why he was leaving us.

  I had wanted to ask her if she saw my father in me at all, or if she thought I might be like him.

  * * *

  It was to be my last summer with Sam Malakite. We were laughing and he leaned back on his heels and watched me. “Well, you have changed. You barely spoke the first season you worked with me.”

&
nbsp; “I was shy,” I said.

  “No, you were quiet,” he said, being more aware and conscious of what I had been than I was. “You have a quiet heart.”

  * * *

  —

  Now and then, in an uninterested way, my mother asked how my work with Mr. Malakite was going, was it at all difficult?

  “Well, there is no schwer,” I replied, and caught a rueful smile on her face.

  “Walter,” she murmured.

  So it was something he must often have said, even to her. I took a breath.

  “What happened to Walter?”

  A quietness, then, “What did you say you two called him?” She threw the book she was reading onto the table.

  “The Moth.”

  She’d lost the wry smile I had witnessed seconds earlier.

  “Was there even a cat?” I asked.

  Her eyes startled. “Yes, Walter told me about your talk. Why did you not remember the cat?”

  “I bury things. What exactly happened to Walter?”

  “He died protecting you both that night, at the Bark. The way he protected you when you were small, that time you ran away, after your father killed your cat.”

  “Why were we not told he was protecting us?”

  “Your sister realized. It is why she will never forgive me his death. I suppose he was the true father to her. And he loved her.”

  “Do you mean he was in love with her?”

  “No. He was just a man without children, who loved children. He wanted you safe.”

  “I didn’t feel safe. Did you know that?”

  She shook her head. “I think Rachel felt safe with him. I know you felt safe with him as a small boy….”

  I stood up. “But why were we not told he was protecting us?”

  “Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.”

  “I grew up with your silence….You know I leave soon, and I won’t see you until Christmas. This could be our last talk for a while.”

  “I know, dear Nathaniel.”

  * * *

  —

  It was September when I began college. Goodbye, goodbye. There was no embrace. I knew that every day she would at some point climb into the hills and reaching a crest look back at her house tucked safely into its fold of earth. Half a mile away would be the Thankful Village. She’d be at a great height, as Felon had taught her. A tall, lean woman coasting the hills. Almost certain of her defences.

  * * *

  When he comes, he will be like an Englishman, she had written. But the person who came for Rose Williams was a young woman, somebody’s heir. This is, I now tell myself, how it happened. Our mother never went into the village, but the villagers knew where Rose Williams lived, and the woman had come straight to White Paint, dressed as a cross-country runner, no props or disguises. Even that might have been obvious to my mother, but it was a dark October evening and it was too late when she made out the woman’s pale oval face through the condensation of the greenhouse window. She was standing there, still. Then broke the pane with her right elbow. She’s left-handed, my mother must have thought to herself.

  “You are Viola?”

  “My name is Rose, dear,” she said.

  “Viola? Are you Viola?”

  “Yes.”

  It must have felt no worse than all the possibilities of death she had imagined, even dreamt about. Quick and fatal. As if it was finally an ending of feuds, of a war. Perhaps allowing a redeeming. That is what I think now. The greenhouse was humid and with the broken pane there was a breeze. The young woman fired again to make sure. And then she was running like a harrier over the fields as if she were my mother’s soul leaving her body, the way my mother herself had fled this house at the age of eighteen to go to university in order to study languages and meet my father during her second year, give up the idea of law school, have two children, and then flee us as well.

  A WALLED GARDEN

  A year ago I came across a book by Olive Lawrence in our local store, and that afternoon while I set up a humming twine to scare the scavenger birds in the garden, I kept waiting for evening so I could read it without interruption. Apparently it was the basis of a forthcoming television documentary, and so the next day I went out and bought a television set. Such an object has never been part of my life, and when it arrived it was a surreal guest in the Malakites’ small living room. It was as if I had suddenly decided to buy a boat or a seersucker suit.

  I watched the programme, unable at first to compare the Olive Lawrence I saw on the box to the one I’d known as a teenager. To be truthful I no longer remembered what she looked like. She had been mostly a presence for me. I remembered how she moved, as well as the no-nonsense clothes she wore, even when arriving for a night out with The Darter. As for her face, the one I saw speaking to me now had the same enthusiasm, and this quickly became the face I attached to my earlier memories of her. Now she was clambering up a rockface in Jordan, now rappelling down while still addressing the camera. Once again I was being offered specific wisdoms about water tables, the varieties of hail across the European landmass, how leaf-cutter ants could destroy whole forests—all this data about the complex balance of nature was being handed with clarifying ease to us in that same small female palm of hers. I had been right. She could have knitted together my life wisely, not avoiding the complexity of distant rivalries or losses that were unknown to me, in much the way she was able to recognize a tempest preparing itself, or the way she had recognized Rachel’s epilepsy by some gesture or quiet evasion in her. I had benefited from the clarity of female opinion in this person who had no close connection to me. In the brief time I knew her, I believed Olive Lawrence was on my side. I stood there and was perceived.

  I read her book, watched the documentary in which she hiked across ravaged olive orchards in Palestine, stepped on and off Mongolian trains, bent over and diagrammed the figure-eight path of the lunar sky on a dusty street using walnuts and an orange. She was unchanged, still constantly new. A long time after my mother told me of Olive’s war work, I’d read the terse official reports of how scientists recorded wind speeds, preparing for D-Day, and how she and others had risen into a dark sky infested with other gliders that shuddered in the air brittle as glass, in order to listen to how porous the wind was and search for rainless light, so they could postpone or confirm the invasion. The weather journals she had shown me and my sister, full of medieval woodcuts depicting varieties of hail, or sketches of Saussure’s cyanometer, which distinguished the various blues in the sky, were never just theoretical to her. She and others must have felt like magicians at that moment, conjuring up what generations of science had taught them.

  * * *

  Olive was the first to reappear out from that half-buried era when we all had met at Ruvigny Gardens. As for The Darter, I still had no clue as to where he lived. It was years since I had seen him, and I could not even remember his real name. He and The Moth and the others existed now only in that ravine of childhood. While my adult life had been spent mostly in a government building, attempting to trace the career my mother had taken.

  Now and then there would be days in the Archives when I’d come across information from distant events that overlapped with my mother’s activities. I would in this way glimpse details of another operation or place. And so one afternoon, following a tangent to her activities, I came upon references to the transportation of nitroglycerine during the war. How it was transported secretly across the city of London and, because it was dangerous freight, how this needed to be done at night, with the public unaware. This had continued even during the Blitz, when there was just warlight, the river dark save for one dimmed orange light on bridges to mark the working arch for water traff
ic, a quiet signal in the midst of the bombing, and the barges ablaze, and shrapnel frapping across the water, while on the blacked-out roads the secret lorries crossed the city three or four times a night. It was a thirty-mile journey from Waltham Abbey, where the Great Nitrator produced nitroglycerine, to an unnamed underground location in the heart of the city, which turned out to be on Lower Thames Street.

  Sometimes a floor gives way and a tunnel below leads to an old destination. Barely pausing I made my way to the large room of hanging maps. I pulled down various charts, searching out possible routes the nitro trucks might have taken. I knew, almost before my hand traced their path, the indelible names: Sewardstone Street, Cobbins Brook Bridge, a jog west from the graveyard, then south, until it reached Lower Thames Street. The night route I used to take with The Darter, when I was a youth, after the war was over.

  My long-forgotten Darter, that smuggler, a minor criminal, had possibly been a hero of sorts, for the activity was dangerous work. What he’d done after the war was just a consequence of the peace. That familiar false modesty of the English, which included absurd secrecy or the cliché of an innocent boffin, was somewhat like those carefully painted formal dioramas that hid the truth and closed the door on their private selves. It had concealed in some ways the most remarkable theatrical performance of any European nation. Along with undercover agents, who included great-aunts, semi-competent novelists, a society couturier who’d been a spy in Europe, the designers and builders of false bridges on the Thames that were meant to confuse German bombers who attempted to follow the river into the heart of London, chemists who became specialists on poisons, village crofters on the east coast who were given lists of German sympathizers to be killed if and when the invasion came, and ornithologists and beekeepers from Kew, as well as permanent bachelors well versed in the Levant and a handful of languages—one of whom turned out to be Arthur McCash, who continued in the Service most of his life. All of them abiding by the secrecy of their roles, even when the war was over, and receiving only, years later, a quiet sentence in an obituary that mentioned they had “served with distinction in the Foreign Office.”