Warlight(29)

McCash pulled the sides of his jacket close together as if to keep himself secure. “We knew they were following Nathaniel. A group from Yugoslavia. Perhaps Italians. We’re not sure yet.”

Then they were talking about places I didn’t know. She slipped her scarf off her neck and wrapped it like a bandage round his wrist.

“Where else?”

He pointed to his chest. “Mostly here,” he said.

She moved closer. “All right. Oh, all right…all right.” She kept saying those words as she opened up his shirt, tugging it free of the drying blood.

She reached for a vase on the table, threw the few flowers out and poured water from it onto his bare chest so she could see the cuts better. “Always knives,” she murmured. “Felon often said they were going to come after us. Revenge. If not the survivors, the relatives, their children.” She was swabbing the cuts on his stomach. I realized he must have got them protecting Rachel and me. “People don’t forget. Not even children. Why should they….” She sounded bitter.

McCash said nothing.

“What about Walter?”

“He might not make it. You need to take the boy and the girl away from here. There may be others.”

“Yes…All right. All right…” She walked over to me, and bent down. She put her hand on my face, then lay beside me for a moment on the couch. “Hello.”

“Hello. Where were you?”

“I’m back now.”

“Such a curious dream…” I cannot remember now which one of us said that, which one of us murmured it into the arms of the other. I heard Arthur McCash stand up.

“I’ll find Rachel.” He passed us and disappeared. I heard later that he climbed every level of the narrow building, searching for my sister, hidden somewhere with The Darter. At first he couldn’t find them. He went along the unlit hallways not sure if there were others still dangerous in the building. He entered rooms and whispered “Wren,” which was what my mother told him to say. If a door was sealed he broke it open and entered. He was bleeding again. He listened for breathing, said “Wren” again, as if a password, giving her time to believe him. “Wren.” “Wren.” Again and again, until “Yes,” she replied, not really sure, and so he found her crouched behind a painted stage landscape leaning against a wall, in The Darter’s arms.

Sometime afterwards Rachel and I came down the carpeted stairs together. A small group was gathered in the lobby. Our mother, half a dozen men in plainclothes, who she said were there to protect us, McCash, The Darter. Two men in handcuffs lay on the ground, and separately a third, partially covered with a blanket, the face bloody, unrecognizable, gazing towards us. There was a gasp from Rachel. “Who is that?” A policeman bent down and pulled the blanket up over the face. Rachel began screaming. Then someone covered my sister’s head and mine with coats so we were anonymous as we were led out onto the street. I could hear Rachel’s muffled crying as we were bundled into separate vans, to be delivered to separate destinations.

Where were we going? Into another life.



PART TWO



INHERITANCE



In November of 1959, when I was twenty-eight, after some years of what had felt like wilderness, I bought a home for myself in a Suffolk village that could be reached by a few hours’ train ride from London. It was a modest house with a walled garden. I purchased it without bartering over the cost with the owner, a Mrs. Malakite. I did not wish to argue with someone obviously distressed at having to sell the home she had lived in for most of her life. I also did not want to risk losing that particular property. It was a house I loved.

She did not remember me when she opened the door. “I am Nathaniel,” I said, and reminded her of our appointment. We stood for a moment by the door, then walked into the parlour. I said, “You have a walled garden,” and she stopped in her tracks.

“How do you know that?”

She shook her head and walked on. She had been preparing to surprise me perhaps with the beauty of her garden when compared with the actual house. I had spoiled the revelation.

I told her quickly that I agreed to the proposed price. And because I knew there were plans for her to move soon into a retirement home, I arranged to come back and walk through the garden with her. She could show me the invisible details of it all then, give me some pointers about caring for the place.

I returned a few days later and once again I could see she barely remembered me. I brought a sketch pad and explained I wished her to help me locate where certain seeds of plants and vegetables were now buried. She liked the idea of that. As far as she was concerned, it might have been the first smart thing I had said. So together we created a map of the garden, copying it down from her memory, along with quick notes as to when certain plants would appear, and in which beds. I listed the vegetables that hemmed the greenhouse and skirted the brick wall. Her knowledge was detailed, clearly accurate. That was the segment in her memory from far in the past that she could still reach. It was also clear she had continued with the upkeep of the garden since the death of her husband, Mr. Malakite, two years earlier. Only the recent memories, with no one now to share them, had begun to evaporate.

We walked between the white-painted beehives and she produced from her apron pocket a wedge to raise the sodden ribs of wood so we could look into the lower level of the hive, the bees assaulted suddenly by sunlight. The old queen had been murdered, she told me casually. The hive would need a new one. I watched her stuff a piece of rag into the smoker and light it, and soon the queenless bees were quivering under the fumes she was puffing down on them. Then she sorted through the two levels of half-conscious bees. It was strange to consider their world being organized in such a godlike way by a woman who was remembering less and less of her own universe. Still it was clear watching and listening to her that details about the care of her garden and the three beehives and the heating of the angular greenhouse would be the last things forgotten.