Warlight(12)

One day I was fighting with Rachel over a book I had lost. She had denied taking it, and I then discovered it in her room. Her arms flailed against my face. I grabbed her neck and she froze, fell out of my grip and began shuddering and banging her head and her heels against the wood floor. Then a cat-like noise, the pupils slid away, replaced by the whites of her eyes, her arms still flailing. The door opened, letting in noise from the crowd downstairs, and The Darter walked in. He must have been passing her room. “Go away!” I yelled. He closed the door behind him, knelt down, took my book, the stolen Swallows and Amazons, and jammed it into Rachel’s mouth at the moment she gasped for air. He pulled a blanket that was on the bed over her, then lay down beside her and enclosed her in his arms. Until there was only the noise of her breath.

“She stole my book,” I whispered nervously.

“Bring some cold water. Rub it on her face, cool her down.” I did that. Twenty minutes later the three of us were still together on the floor. We could hear The Moth’s acquaintances downstairs.

“Has this happened before?”

“No.”

“I had a dog once”—he said it casually—“who was epileptic. Now and then he’d go off like a firecracker.” The Darter leaned against the bed, winked at me, and lit himself a cigarette. He knew Rachel hated him smoking around her. Now she just watched him silently. “That’s a crap book,” he announced, rubbing his fingers over Rachel’s bite marks on the cover. “You need to take care of your sister, Nathaniel. I’ll show you what to do.”

How surprising The Pimlico Darter could be whenever that other side of him emerged. How good he was that evening, while The Moth’s party continued downstairs.

In those days there was more fear about the effects of epilepsy, along with the assumption that frequent fits impaired a person’s memory. Rachel mentioned these limits after reading about them in the library. I suppose we choose whatever life we feel safest in; for me it is a distant village, a walled garden. But Rachel tossed away such concerns. “It’s just ‘schwer,’?” she would say to me, using her fingers to emphasize the quotation marks.





A woman who was going out with The Darter had begun strolling into my parents’ house, accompanying him, or arriving at whatever hour she was to meet him there. On her first visit, The Darter arrived too late to explain who she was, so my sister and I, just home from school, were left to introduce ourselves in the vacuum created by his absence. It meant we got a good look at her. We were careful not to mention other females The Darter had already escorted into the house, so we answered her inquiries about him somewhat stupidly, as if we could not remember much about his associates or even what he did, or where he might be. We knew he liked to breast his cards.

Still, Olive Lawrence was a surprise. For someone like The Darter, who was so one-sided in his opinions as to the role women ought to have in the world, he appeared to have an almost suicidal tendency to select highly independent women to go out with. They were tested right away by being taken to crowded and noise-filled sports events at Whitechapel or Wembley Stadium, where there was no possibility of private conversation. The triple-forecast bets were supposed to provide enough excitement for them. Besides, for The Darter there were no other interesting public locations to visit. He’d never stepped inside a theatre in his life. The idea of watching someone pretend to be real, or of someone saying lines on stage that came from previously written dialogue, felt untrustworthy to him, and as a man on the edge of the law he needed to feel secure about how reliable the truth was that he was hearing. Only cinemas appealed to him; for some reason he believed truth had been caught there. Yet the women he was attracted to seemed to be in no way humble or easily persuaded maidens who would happily exist under his rules. One was a painter of murals. Another, after Olive Lawrence departed, was an argumentative Russian.

Olive Lawrence, who appeared alone that first afternoon so that the three of us had to introduce ourselves, was a geographer and ethnographer. She was, she told us, often in the Hebrides recording wind currents, at other times in the Far East being a solitary traveller. There was something in these professional women that suggested it was not a case of The Darter’s selecting them but of the women’s choosing him; as if Olive Lawrence, a specialist in distant cultures, had stumbled suddenly on a man who reminded her of an almost extinct medieval species, a person still unaware of any of the principal courtesies introduced in the past hundred years. Here was someone who had never heard of people eating only vegetables or opening a door for a woman so she might enter a building ahead of him. Who else would have fascinated a person like Olive Lawrence but this man who seemed to be frozen in time, or perhaps released from a recently discovered sect now miraculously in evidence in her own home town. Yet there appeared to be little choice in how women participated with The Darter. The only rules played by were his.

The hour Olive Lawrence spent with us, as she waited for her new beau, was given over to telling us in a somewhat amazed voice about the first dinner they had shared. He had found her among The Moth’s friends and then steered her to a Greek restaurant, a narrow rectangle of a place with five tables and submarine lighting, then proposed they seal a newly found intimacy (that had not in fact occurred but would shortly) with the sharing of a meal of goat and a bottle of red wine. Did something cross her mind then, some gale warning or other? But she acquiesced.