Warlight(3)

With our father’s absence our house began to feel freer and more spacious, and we spent as much time with her as we could. We listened to thrillers on the radio, the lights left on because we wanted to watch one another’s faces. No doubt she was bored by them, but we insisted she be with us while we heard foghorns and wolf-like winds across the moors and slow criminal footsteps or a window splintering, and during those dramas I carried in my mind the half-told story of her driving without lights to the coast. But as far as radio programmes went, she was more at ease lying on the chaise on Saturday afternoons, listening to The Naturalist’s Hour on the BBC and ignoring the book she was holding in her hands. The programme reminded her of Suffolk, she said. And we would overhear the man on the radio going on endlessly about river insects, and chalk streams he had fished in; it sounded like a microscopic and distant world, while Rachel and I crouched on the carpet working on a jigsaw puzzle, piecing together sections of a blue sky.

Once the three of us took a train from Liverpool Street to what had been her childhood home in Suffolk. Earlier that year our grandparents had died in a car crash, so now we watched our mother roaming their house silently. I remember we always had to walk carefully along the edge of the hall, otherwise the hundred-year-old wood floor squawked and squealed. “It’s a nightingale floor,” our grandmother told us. “It warns us of thieves in the night.” Rachel and I always leapt onto it whenever we could.

But we were happiest with our mother on our own in London. We wanted her casual and sleepy affection, more than what we had been given before. It was as if she had returned to an earlier version of herself. She had been, even before my father’s departure, a quick-moving and efficient mother, leaving for work when we left for school and returning usually in time for supper with us. Was this new version caused by a release from her husband? Or in a more complex way was it a preparation for withdrawal from us, with clues of how she wished to be remembered? She helped me with my French and my Caesar’s Gallic War—she was a wonder at Latin and French—preparing me for boarding school. Most surprisingly, she encouraged various homemade theatrical performances in the solitude of our house where we would dress up as priests or walk like sailors and villains on the balls of our feet.

Did other mothers do this? Did they fall gasping over the sofa with a flung dagger in their backs? None of this would she do if The Moth was about. But why did she do it at all? Was she bored with looking after us on a daily basis? Did dressing up or dressing down make her another, not just our mother? Best of all, when first light slipped into our rooms, we’d enter her bedroom like tentative dogs and gaze at her undressed face, the closed eyes, the white shoulders and arms already stretched out to gather us in. For, whatever the hour, she was always awake, ready for us. We never surprised her. “Come here, Stitch. Come here, Wren,” she would murmur, her personal nicknames for us. I suspect that was the time Rachel and I felt we had a real mother.

In early September the steamer trunk was brought out of the basement and we watched as she filled it with frocks, shoes, necklaces, English fiction, maps, along with objects and equipment she said she did not expect to find in the East, even what looked like some unnecessary woollens, for she told us the evenings were often “brisk” in Singapore. She made Rachel read out loud from a Baedeker about the terrain and the bus services, as well as the local terminology for “Enough!” or “More,” and “How far is it?” We recited the phrases out loud with our clichéd accents of the East.

Maybe she believed that the specifics and calmness of packing a large trunk would assure us of the sanity of her journey rather than make us feel even more bereft. It was almost as if we expected her to climb into that black wooden trunk, so much like a coffin with those brass corner edges, and be deported away from us. It took several days, this act of packing, and felt slow and fateful in its activity, like an endless ghost story. Our mother was about to be altered. She would evolve into something invisible to us. Perhaps for Rachel it felt different. She was more than a year older. It may have looked theatrical to her. But for me the act of continual reconsidering and repacking suggested a permanent disappearance. Prior to our mother’s leaving, the house had been our cave. Only a few times did we walk along the embankment of the river. She said that travel was something she would be doing too much of in the coming weeks.

Then suddenly she had to leave, for some reason sooner than expected. My sister went into the bathroom and painted her face a blank white, then knelt with that emotionless face at the top of the stairs and circled her arms through the railings and would not let go. By the front door I joined our mother in an argument against Rachel, attempting to persuade her to come downstairs. It was as if our mother had arranged things so there would be no tearful goodbyes.

There’s a photograph I have of my mother in which her features are barely revealed. I recognize her from just her stance, some gesture in her limbs, even though it was taken before I was born. She is seventeen or eighteen, and snapped by her parents along the banks of their Suffolk river. She has been swimming, has climbed into her dress, and now stands on one foot, the other leg bent sideways in order to put on a shoe, her head tilted down so that her blond hair covers her face. I found it years later in the spare bedroom among the few remnants she had decided not to throw away. I have it with me still. This almost anonymous person, balanced awkwardly, holding on to her own safety. Already incognito.