Warlight(28)

That autumn our boat journeys must have been a glimpse of unattainable childhood for her—weekends with a boyfriend and his father. Agnes would chant, “Oh, I love your dad! You must love him too!” Then she would become curious again about my mother. The Darter, having never met her, was prone to excessive descriptions of her outfits as well as hairstyles. When it became clear he was modelling my mother on Olive Lawrence, it was easier for me to join in and insert more details beside his. With the help of such false information our life on the barge became even more domestic. In spite of its sparseness, the boat provided more furniture than the places where Agnes and I usually met. And there were now lock keepers she recognized and waved to as we passed. She brought a few pamphlets about the trees and about pond life, nameless to her until now. Then one about Waltham Abbey, so she could rattle off information about what had been created there—guncotton in the 1860s, then bolt-action rifles, carbines, submachine guns, flare pistols, mortar shells, all of them made only miles north of the Thames at that monastery. Agnes was a dry sponge for information, and after one or two trips knew more about what had gone on at the abbey than the lock keepers we passed. It was a monk, she told us, a monk! in the thirteenth century who wrote about the formation of gunpowder, though being fearful of this discovery he had written out the details in Latin.

—

There are times when I want to place those moments when we were in the cuts and canals north of the Thames into other hands, in order to understand what was happening to us. I had lived a mostly harboured life. Now, cut loose by my parents, I was consuming everything around me. Whatever our mother was doing and wherever she was, I was strangely content. Even though things were being kept from us.

I remember dancing with Agnes one night at a jazz club in Bromley, The White Hart. It was a crowded dance floor, and somewhere on the periphery I thought I caught sight of my mother. I wheeled around but she was gone. All I hold from that moment is the blur of a curious face, watching me.

“What is it? What is it?” Agnes asked.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

“I thought I saw my mother.”

“I thought she was away somewhere?”

“Yes, that’s what I thought.”

I stood very still, rigid on the heaving dance floor.

—

Is this how we discover the truth, evolve? By gathering together such unconfirmed fragments? Not only of my mother, but of Agnes, Rachel, Mr. Nkoma (and where is he now?). Will all of them who have remained incomplete and lost to me become clear and evident when I look back? Otherwise how do we survive that forty miles of bad terrain during adolescence that we crossed without any truthful awareness of ourselves? “The self is not the principal thing,” was a half-wisdom Olive Lawrence murmured to me once.

I think now of those mysterious lorries that drove up to meet us in order to collect the unlabelled crates in silence, of the woman watching me dance with Agnes with, it seems in retrospect, such curiosity and pleasure. And the departure of Olive Lawrence, the entrance of Arthur McCash, the range of silences in The Moth…You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit. You take your adult self with you. It is not to be a reliving, but a rewitnessing. Unless of course you wish, like my sister, to damn and enact revenge on the whole pack of them.



Schwer

It was almost Christmas and Rachel was in the back seat of the Morris with me. The Moth was taking us in The Darter’s car to a small theatre called the Bark. We were supposed to meet him there. The Moth had parked in an alley alongside the theatre when a man got into the front seat beside him, put a hand behind his head and swung it forward, banging it against the steering wheel then against the door, pulled it back and did it again, even as someone else slid in next to Rachel and covered her face with a cloth, holding it there as she struggled, all the while watching me. “Nathaniel Williams, right?” It was the man on the bus when I was with Agnes, and again that night in the lift. Rachel’s body collapsed into his lap. He reached over, grabbed my hair and put the same cloth over my face, saying, “Nathaniel and Rachel, right?” I already knew it must be chloroform and I didn’t breathe, until I had to gasp it in. The schwer, I’d have thought if I had been conscious.

I woke in a large, barely lit room. I could hear singing. It felt miles away. I tried to mouth “the man on the bus” to myself so I would remember. Where was my sister? Then I must have slept again. A hand touched me in the darkness to pull me awake.

“Hello, Stitch.”

I recognized my mother’s voice. Then I heard her walk away. I lifted my head. I saw her dragging a chair across the floor. At a long table, at the other end of the room, I saw Arthur McCash sitting hunched over, blood on his white shirt. My mother sat down next to him.

“The blood,” my mother said. “Whose is it?”

“Mine. Maybe Walter’s too. When I picked him up. His head…”

“Not Rachel?”

“No.”

“Are you certain?” she said.

“My blood, Rose.” I was surprised he knew my mother’s name. “Rachel’s safe, somewhere in the theatre. I saw her carried inside. And we now have the boy.’’

She looked back and stared at me on the couch. I don’t think she knew I was awake. She turned back to McCash and lowered her voice. “Because if she is not, I will publicly turn against all of you, none of you will be safe. This was your responsibility. This was the bargain. How did they get so close to my children?”