Warlight(14)

Around us were untranslatable sounds, something in flight, a series of footfalls. I could hear Rachel’s breath but there was no sound from Olive Lawrence. Then in the dark she began to talk, to distinguish the barely heard noises for us. “It’s a warm evening…and the pitch of those crickets is in D….They have that sweet quiet whistle, but it’s made with the rub of their wings, not by breath, and this much conversation means there will be rain. That’s why it’s so dark now, the clouds are between us and the moon. Listen.” We saw her pale hand point near us, to the left. “That scrape is a badger. Not digging, just his paws moving. Really, it’s something tender. Perhaps the end of a fearful dream. Just the remains of a small uneven nightmare in his head. We all have nightmares. For you, dear Rachel, it might be imagining the fear of a seizure. But there need not be fear in a dream, just as there’s no danger from the rain while we are under the trees. Lightning rarely comes during this month, we are safe. Let’s walk on. The crickets might move with us, the branches and underbrush appear to be full of them, full of high C’s and D’s. They can reach as high as an F at the end of summer when they are laying eggs. Their cries seem to fall on you from above, don’t they? It feels like an important night for them. Remember that. Your own story is just one, and perhaps not the important one. The self is not the principal thing.”

Hers was the calmest voice I knew when I was a boy. There was never argument in it. She had just this tactile curiosity about what interested her, and that calmness allowed you to be within her intimate space. In daylight she always caught your eye as she talked or as she listened, she was completely with you. As she was with the two of us that night. A night she wanted us to remember, as I have. Rachel and I would not have walked through the darkness of that forest alone. But we were confident that Olive Lawrence had some tracing in her head from a faint light in the distance or a shift of wind that told her exactly where she was and what she was going towards.

There were other times, however, when a different ease took over and she’d fall asleep unconcerned in my father’s leather chair at Ruvigny Gardens, her feet tucked under her, even if the room was full of The Moth’s friends, the look on her face still intent, focused, as if continuing to receive information. She was the first woman, in fact the first person, I ever saw do that, sleep so casually in the presence of others without guilt. Then wake refreshed half an hour later when others were beginning to tire, and stride off into the night, refusing The Darter’s not-too-convincing offer to drive her home—as if she now wished to walk through the city alone, with a new thought. I would go upstairs and watch her from my bedroom window as she entered and passed each pool of streetlight. I could hear her whistling faintly as if recalling a tune, something unknown to me.

In spite of our night journeys, I knew Olive’s profession usually meant daylight work, measuring the effects of nature on coastlines. She had worked apparently within the Admiralty on sea currents and tides, barely out of her teens, during the first stages of the war. (She admitted to this modestly only after it had been almost revealed by someone in The Moth’s group.) There were all these landscapes within her. She could read the noise of forests, she had timed the rhythm of the tidal slop along the embankment at Battersea Bridge. I am always curious why Rachel and I never ventured into a life like hers and her vivid example of independence as well as empathy for everything around her. But you must remember we did not know Olive Lawrence for that long. Though the night walks—accompanying her along the bombed-out docklands or into the echoing Greenwich Foot Tunnel, our three voices singing a lyric she was teaching us, “Under stars chilled by the winter, under an August moon…”—I will not forget.

She was tall. Lithe. She must have been lithe, I suppose, with The Darter when she was his lover for the brief period of that unlikely relationship. I don’t know. I don’t know. What does a boy know? I always saw her during that time as self-sufficient, for instance when she slept in our semi-crowded living room in a state of separateness from all the others. Is this the censorship or tact of the young? I can more easily see her embracing a dog, lying on the floor beside it, the weight of its head on her throat, so she is scarcely able to breathe but content to let the animal remain there, that way. But a man dancing close to her? I imagine a response of claustrophobia in her. She thrilled to open space and weather nights, as if she could never be contained or fully revealed there. And yet of all those acquaintances and strangers who walked into and out of the house at Ruvigny Gardens, she was the most distinct. She appeared to be the accident, the outsider at our table, whom The Darter had discovered at my parents’ house, and more surprisingly taken up with so she would soon be known as “The Darter’s Girl.”

“I’ll send you two a postcard,” Olive Lawrence said when she eventually left London. And then was gone from our lives.

But somewhere on the borders of the Black Sea or at some small village post office near Alexandria, she would indeed mail us a platonic billet-doux about a cloud system in the mountains that suggested an alternative world, her other life. The postcards became our treasures, especially as we knew there was now no communication between her and The Darter. She’d journeyed out of his life without a backward glance. The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states. Though perhaps not. What did that boy know….