Warlight(27)

The Darter, in this sudden new role as my father, took on a protective and avuncular air with Agnes. She, surprised by his manner, thought he was a “card.” He invited her to a dog track one Saturday, and this finally provided her with an explanation as to how I had turned up that night in Mill Hill with four greyhounds. “The greatest night of my life, so far,” she murmured to him. She loved arguing with The Darter. And I saw instantly what Olive Lawrence found enjoyable in his company. If he allowed himself a questionable remark, he would let Agnes grab him by the neck and attempt to strangle him. I was invited over for a further dinner at her shy parents’, with my father, and he brought a bottle of foreign alcohol in an attempt to impress them. Hardly anyone did that in those days. Most people did not even own a corkscrew, so he took the bottle out onto the balcony and shattered the neck off on a railing. “Watch for glass,” he announced cheerfully. He wondered if anyone at the table had ever eaten goat. “Nathaniel’s mother loves it,” he announced. He proposed changing the station on the radio from the Home Service to some livelier music so he could have a dance with Agnes’s mother, who gave a terrified laugh and clung to her chair. I listened forensically to everything he said that evening, making sure he got the correct name of my school, my mother’s name, and the rest of our prepared plot—for instance, that my mother was now up in the Hebrides for work reasons. The Darter enjoyed this verbose patriarchal role, though his preference was always to get others talking.

He got on with the parents but he loved Agnes, and so I came to love Agnes too. I started to recognize aspects of her through The Darter’s eyes. He had that quick awareness about people. She walked with us after the meal down the stairs of the council flat building, and then to the car. “Of course! The Morris,” she said, “which brought the dogs!” And if I felt any nervousness about the replacement of my real father with The Darter, it subsided. After that Agnes and I would laugh over my father’s excessive manners. So when I was with my sister and this supposed father floating up the River Lee in the borrowed barge, I almost began to see the three of us as a believable family unit.

One weekend The Moth had insisted on taking my sister somewhere, so I suggested Agnes replace her on the barge. The Darter hesitated but liked the idea of this pistol, as he called her, coming with us. She may have had a confused version of The Darter’s profession but she was flabbergasted by where we took her. This was not an England she knew. We’d gone barely a hundred yards alongside Newton’s Pool when she dove off the barge in her cotton dress. Then clambered from the water onto the bank, white as porcelain, covered in mud. “That’s a too-caged greyhound,” I heard him say behind me. I just watched. She beckoned us over and climbed back into the boat and stood there, the cold autumn clinging to her in the sunlight, pools of water at her feet. “Give me your shirt,” she said. When we tied up at Newton’s Pool we ate our lunch of sandwiches.

There’s another map I learned by heart that I still have clear in my memory, which distinguishes what was river and what was canal or cut in those waterways north of the Thames. And where three locks existed and we had to pause for twenty minutes while river water was admitted into or released out of the dark chambers in which we hung, so we could rise or drop to another height, Agnes in awe as that old industrial machinery rolled and clambered around us. It was the unknown brave old world for her, this seventeen-year-old who usually was tethered to just what was allowed her by class and lack of money, a world she’d probably never leave, who had sadly recited that dream of the pearl. Those weekends were her first ventures into a rural world, and I knew she would always love The Darter for bringing her on what she assumed was his boat. She embraced me, still shivering in my shirt, for inviting her on this river journey. We moved under a panoply of passing trees, which simultaneously floated in the water below us. We entered the shadow of a narrow bridge, silent because The Darter insisted it was bad luck to talk or whistle or even sigh under any bridge. Such rules handed out by him—walking under ladders was not bad luck, but picking up a playing card on the street was tremendous luck—have followed me most of my life, and perhaps they have followed Agnes too.

Whenever The Darter read a newspaper or racing form he spread it on one thigh that was crossed over the other, and rested his head as if wearily on his hand. Always the same position. On one of those river afternoons I saw Agnes sketching him while he was lost in the intrigues of his Sunday paper. I got up and walked behind her, didn’t stop, just glanced quickly down to see what she had done. It would be the only drawing I saw of hers apart from the one on butcher paper she had given me after that night storm. But it was not The Darter she was drawing, as I thought, but me. Just a youth looking towards something or someone. As if this was what I really was, perhaps would become, someone not intent on knowing himself but preoccupied with others. I recognized it even then as a truth. It was not a picture of me but about me. I was too shy to ask to look at it properly and I’ve no idea what happened to it. Perhaps she gave it to “my father,” even if she did not believe her talent was anything special. She had worked at a day job from the age of fourteen, had never finished school, took an art course at a polytechnic on Wednesday nights that might offer a small window of escape. She would go to work the following morning energized by that other world. It was the one independent pleasure in her variously interlocked existence. During our evenings in borrowed buildings, she would wake suddenly from a deep sleep, see me watching her, and release a guilty and delicious smile. I suppose that was the moment I felt I belonged most to her.