Warlight(30)

“Where do the bees travel, when they are let out?”

“Oh…” She just gestured at the hills. “That sedge over there. Even as far as Halesworth, I wouldn’t be surprised.” She appeared sure about their tastes and familiar urges.

Her name was Linette and she was seventy-six. I knew that.

“You must feel you can always come back, Mrs. Malakite, to see the garden, your bees….”

She turned from me without a word. Without even shaking her head she made it evident that it was a foolish thing to suggest, to return to where she’d lived all these years with her husband. There was much I could have said, but it would have insulted her more. And I had already been too sentimental.

“Are you from America?” she retaliated.

“I was there, once. But I grew up in London. For a while I lived near this village.”

She was surprised by this and did not quite believe it.

“What do you do?”

“I work in the city. Three days a week.”

“At what? Money, I suppose.”

“No, it is sort of government work.”

“Doing what?”

“Ah, that’s the question. Various things…” I paused. I sounded ridiculous. I said, “I’ve always been comforted by the security of a walled garden, ever since my teens.” I watched for any sign of interest from her, but all I could feel was that I was not making a good impression, she appeared to have lost all faith in me, this seemingly random fellow who had bought this place out from under her so casually. I tugged a sprig of rosemary off a bush, rubbed it between my fingers, inhaled it, and put it in my shirt pocket. I saw her watching my actions, as if trying to remember something. I held on to the diagram of the garden I’d drawn hastily that showed where she had planted leeks, snowdrops, asters, and phlox. Beyond the wall I could see the great spread of their mulberry tree.

The afternoon sunlight filled the walled garden, built to hold back tradewinds from the east coast. I had thought of this place so often. The warmth within its walls, its shaded light, the sense of safety I always found here. She kept watching me, as if I was a stranger in her garden, but in fact I could have composed her life. I knew a good deal about her years in this small Suffolk village with her husband. I could have entered and roamed within the story of their marriage as easily as I might have within the lives of others who had surrounded me in my youth, who were part of my self-portrait, composed from the way they had caught glimpses of me. Just as I now reflected Mrs. Malakite, standing in her cared-for garden during the last days of her ownership of it.

I used to wonder how affectionate and close the bond was between the Malakites. They were, after all, the only couple I saw regularly in my late teens, during those school breaks when I would stay with my mother. I had no other examples. Was theirs a relationship based on contentment? Did they irritate each other? I was never certain, for I was usually alone with Mr. Malakite, working in his fields or in what had once been victory gardens. He had his terrain, his certainties about soil, weather, and was somehow more at ease and varied when working alone. I used to hear him talking to my mother, and it was a different voice that spoke to her. He would actively propose she remove a hedge from the east side of her lawn, often laugh at her innocence about the natural world. Whereas with Mrs. Malakite he tended to leave the plans for an evening and the paths of conversations up to her.

Sam Malakite remained a mystery to me. No one really understands another’s life or even death. I knew a veterinarian who had two parrots. The birds had lived together for years, even before she inherited them. Their feathers had a mixture of green and dark brown I found beautiful. I do not like parrots, but I liked the look of these two. Eventually one of them died. I sent a note of condolence to the veterinarian. And a week later, seeing her, I asked if the surviving bird was in a state of depression or at least at a loss. “Oh no,” she said, “he’s overjoyed!”

In any case, a couple of years after Mr. Malakite died, I bought and moved into their small timbered house protected by that walled garden. It had been a long time since I’d visited it regularly, but almost immediately a past that felt completely erased began returning. And there was a hunger towards it I never had when days had slipped past me at the speed of a blink. I was in The Darter’s Morris and it was summer and the cloth roof of his car stretched up and folded back slowly. I was at a football match with Mr. Nkoma. I was in mid-river eating sandwiches with Sam Malakite. “Listen,” Sam Malakite says. “A thrush.” And Agnes naked, to feel fully undressed, was pulling a green ribbon out of her hair.

That unforgotten thrush. That unforgettable ribbon.



After the attack in London, Rachel was enrolled quickly by my mother into a boarding school on the Welsh border, and I was spirited away for safety’s sake to a school in America, where nothing felt familiar to me. I was distanced abruptly from the world I had belonged to, where The Darter and Agnes and the ever mysterious Moth had existed. In certain ways it felt a greater loss than when my mother had gone away. I’d lost my youth, I was unmoored. After a month I ran away from the school without any clear idea where I was going, since I knew almost no one there. I was found, then shuttled back urgently to another school, this time in the north of England, where I remained in a similar isolation. When our spring term ended, a large man picked me up at the school and drove me from Northumberland south for six hours to Suffolk, barely invading my distrustful silence. I was being brought to join my mother, who was living in White Paint, the house that had once been her parents’, in the region called The Saints. It was in light-filled open country, about a mile from the nearest village, where, that summer, I would get a job with the large man who had picked me up at the school, whose name was Malakite.