Warlight(24)
In any case, until the weather turned harsh, we travelled those barely used waterways, guiding the boat along the narrowing rivers. The Darter with his shirt off, his white-ribbed chest bare to the October sun, and my sister memorizing her exits and entrances for Julius Caesar. Until the brown stones of Waltham Abbey rose into view.
We sidled towards the bank and once again heard whistles and once again men appeared and loaded our boxes onto a nearby lorry. Again no words were passed between us. The Darter stood there half dressed and watched them with not even an acknowledgement or nod of his head. His hand was on my shoulder, which committed me to him, or him to me, and it made me feel safe. The men departed, the lorry bouncing away under the overhanging branches up a dirt road. The sight of two teenagers in a boat, one bent over her schoolwork, one with a rakish school cap on his head, must have seemed innocent enough.
—
What kind of family were we a part of now? In retrospect Rachel and I were not too different in our anonymity from the dogs with their fictional papers. Like them we had broken free, adapting to fewer rules, less order. But what had we become? When you are uncertain about which way to go as a youth, you end up sometimes not so much repressed, as might be expected, but illegal, you find yourself easily invisible, unrecognized in the world. Who was Stitch now? Who was Wren? Did my assignations with Agnes insert a thief’s guile into my nature? Or my escapes from school to spend time with The Darter? Not because of the pleasure or gall of it, but because of the tension and risk? When my report card arrived I boiled a kettle and steamed open the official envelope to discover my marks. The comments by teachers were so dismissive I was embarrassed to hand it over to The Moth, who was to hold it for my parents’ return. I burned its pages on the gas stove. There was just too much information. The days I missed school were legion. And words such as “mediocre” appeared on almost every entry like a chant. I tucked the ashes under the carpet on one of the stair steps, as if back into an envelope, and for the rest of the week complained that while Rachel’s report had arrived, mine had not.
Most of the laws I broke during that period of my life were small. Agnes stole food from the restaurants she worked in, until one evening, before leaving work, she tucked a thick slice of frozen ham under her armpit. Held up with last-minute errands, hypothermia got to her and she fainted at the entrance, the ham sliding out from under her blouse onto the linoleum. Somehow the concern for her—she was popular—made her employers ignore the crime.
The Moth kept reminding us still of schwer and to prepare for serious times. But I skated over and ignored what might be heavy or indigestible. The illegal world felt more magical than dangerous to me. Even being introduced by The Darter to someone like the great Forger of Letchworth thrilled me, just as Agnes’s shifting rules did.
Our parents had been gone beyond the promised year—and the spirit level or whatever it was tilted in Rachel. She was now a night person, The Moth recommending her to his friend the opera singer to get her a part-time job in the evenings at Covent Garden. Anything to do with stage work fascinated Rachel—the floppy sheet of metal that produced the sound of thunder, trapdoors, stage smoke, blue reflections of limelight. Just as I had been altered by The Darter, Rachel now evolved into the world of theatre, becoming a stage prompter, not to nudge the tenors on their Italian or French arias, but for the props department who needed a cue to hurry on stage with cloth rivers, or to dismantle a city wall in sixty seconds of darkness. So our days and nights did not feel like the time of the schwer that The Moth had warned us about. They were to us wondrous doorways into the world.
One night, after spending a long evening with Agnes, I was travelling home on the Underground. I needed to make numerous changes to return to central London and I was sleepy. I got off the Piccadilly Line at Aldwych and walked into a lift that I knew always shook and rattled up three levels from the depths of the Tube station. The deserted space in that slow-moving lift could have held fifty commuters during rush hour, but now there was only me. A dim globe light hung in the centre of it. A man came in after me carrying a walking stick. Another man came up behind him. The scissored gate closed and the lift began to move up slowly in the dark. Every ten seconds, as we passed each floor, I could see them watching me. One was the man who had followed Agnes and me onto the bus weeks earlier. He swung his stick, shattering the bulb while the other pulled the emergency lever. An alarm went off. The brakes jammed. Suddenly we were hanging in midair, bouncing on the balls of our feet, trying to keep our balance within that dark hanging cage.
My bored evenings at the Criterion saved me. I knew most lifts had a switch at shoulder or ankle level to free the brake. One or the other. I backed into a corner of the cage as the two men moved towards me. I felt it at my ankle, kicked the locked brake free, and it released. Red lights pulsed in our cage. The lift began moving again and then the doors scissored open onto street level. The two men stepped back, and the one with the stick flung it into the middle of the floor. I was running into the night.
I got home scared, half laughing. The Moth was there and I told him of my clever escape—that lift at the Criterion had taught me something. They must have thought I had money, I said.
A man named Arthur McCash slipped into our house the next day, The Moth announcing he was a friend he had invited for dinner. He was tall and skeletal. Spectacles. A shock of brown hair. One could tell he would always have the presence of a boy in his last year at college. A bit too frail for group sports. Squash perhaps. But this first image of him was inaccurate. I remember he was the only person at the table that first night able to unscrew the cap off an old bottle of mustard. He torqued it open casually and left it on the table. With his sleeves rolled up, I saw the powerful string of muscles along his arms.