Warlight(34)

The shade of his one large mulberry tree. We used to work mostly in vigorous sunlight, so now it is the shade I think of, not the tree. Just its symmetrical dark existence, and its depth and silence, where he talked to me long and lazily about his early days, until it was time to go back to wheelbarrows and hoes. The breeze lifted itself over the shallow hill and entered what felt like our dark room, rustling against us. Could have stayed there forever, under that mulberry. The ants in the grass climbing their green towers.



In the Archives

I worked each day in a fractional corner of that nameless seven-storey building. There was only one man I knew there and he kept his distance. One day he entered a lift I had just stepped into, said, “Hello, Sherlock!” as if the name and greeting were enough of a code between us, and as if the exclamation point that his voice provided would be enough to satisfy the person surprisingly discovered in such a place. Tall, still bespectacled, the same sloping shoulders, as boyish as ever, Arthur McCash got off on the next floor, and I stepped out briefly to watch him wander away from me to some office or other. I knew, as very few probably did, that under his white shirt there were three or four deep scars on his stomach, a bevelled permanence on his white skin.

I was coming into London by train and staying during the week at a rented one-room flat near Guy’s Hospital. There was less chaos in the city now, a sense of people reordering their lives. On weekends I returned to Suffolk. I was living in two worlds as well as two eras. This was the city where I half believed I might catch sight of a certain pale blue Morris belonging to The Darter. I recalled its military-looking crest on the bonnet, the amber-coloured indicator lights clicking up to signal a right-or left-hand turn, then withdrawing back into the structure of the door frame like the ears of a greyhound in aerodynamic flight. And how The Darter, as if a sensitive owl, would catch a false note in the timbre of the engine, a murmur in its heart, so that within minutes he’d be out and removing the valve cover on the 918 cc engine in order to brighten the points of the spark plugs with a strip of sandpaper. The Morris, I recalled, was his flawed joy, and any women he escorted in it needed to accept the fact that he showed it more love and concern than he would ever give them.

But I had no idea if The Darter still owned such a car, or how I might track him down. I’d attempted to visit him at The Pelican Stairs but he had moved away. The only person who had known The Darter well was The Forger of Letchworth, and I sought him out, but he too had disappeared. The truth was, I missed that remarkable table full of strangers who had altered Rachel and me more than our disappeared parents. Where was Agnes? There seemed no way of finding her. When I went to her parents’ flat, they were no longer there. The restaurant in World’s End did not remember her, the polytechnic had no address for her. So my eyes were constantly on the lookout for that familiar blue outline of a two-door Morris.

Months passed at my job. I began to realize that whatever papers might have contained material on my mother would never be revealed to me. Her activities were either already destroyed or deliberately withheld from me. A black hood seemed to have been placed over her war career and I would continue to remain in the dark.

To escape the confines of work I had begun walking the north bank of the Thames at night, sidling past old Anderson shelters where The Darter had once kept dogs. But there was no longer a bark or a scuffle within. I passed various docks, the St. Katharine’s, the East India and the Royal Docks. The war long over, they were no longer padlocked so one night I entered, set the three-minute timer on a lock gate, borrowed a skiff, and caught the tide change.

The river was barely inhabited. It was two or three in the morning and I was alone. Just a tug now and then, towing rubbish out to the Isle of Dogs. I was conscious of the eddies caused by tunnels that ran underwater, so I had to row hard, barely staying in place, almost sucked towards Ratcliffe Cross or the Limehouse Pier. One night the boat I took had a motor, so I travelled as far as Bow Creek and into the two northern arms of that river, almost believing I would find my allies in those dark tributaries. I anchored the stolen boat so that on another night I might use it again to continue upstream into further cuts and canals. Then I walked back into the city, and by eight-thirty in the morning arrived at the office, refreshed.

I do not know what it was that altered me by my taking those journeys again up and down the river where we had once collected groups of dogs. I think it was becoming clear that it was not just my mother’s past that had become buried and anonymous. I felt I too had disappeared. I had lost my youth. I walked through the familiar archive rooms with a new preoccupation. I’d spent the first months of my job knowing I was being watched as we gathered the detritus of a not yet fully censored war. I had never spoken of my mother. When her name was briefly mentioned by a senior official I’d simply shrugged. I had not been trusted then, but now I was, and I knew the specific hours when I would be alone in the archives. I’d learned enough in my youth to be someone unreliable, good at loosening information from an official source, whether it was my school reports or greyhound papers I stole under the guidance of The Darter. His wallet contained slender tools that could be used for any entrance or exit, and I had watched him curiously, had once even seen him adeptly release a dog trap with a chicken bone. A minor anarchy was still in me. But till now I had had no access to the censored row of Double A files, concealed from innocents like me.

It was the veterinarian, the one who had inherited the two parrots, who taught me how to open locks on a filing cabinet. I had met her years earlier through The Darter and she was the only one I had managed to locate from that time. She befriended me on my return to London. I explained my problem and she recommended a powerful anaesthetic used on damaged hooves and bones that I could apply around a lock until a white condensation appeared. The freezing would slow down the lock’s resistance to any trespass and allow me to carry out my next stage of attack. This was a Steinmann pin, which in a more legal world provided skeletal traction and protected the damaged bones of a racing greyhound. The smooth stainless-steel intramedullary pins, petite and efficient, were almost instantly successful, and the locks on the cabinets barely paused before they slipped open with their secrets. I began breaking into the locked files; and, in the usually deserted map room, where I ate my lunch alone, I pulled the borrowed papers out of my shirt and read them. An hour later I returned them to their padlocked homes. If my mother existed in this building, I would discover her.