Warlight(35)

I said nothing about my new knowledge, except to telephone Rachel to tell her of my discoveries. But she had no desire to reenter our youth. Rachel in her own way had abandoned us, did not wish to go back to what was for her a dangerous and unreliable time.

I had not been there when our mother was taken to see her after she had been found safe in The Darter’s arms behind the large painting at the Bark Theatre. The after-effects of the chloroform were still in me. But apparently when my mother entered the room, Rachel would not leave The Darter. She clung to him and turned away from our mother. She had had a seizure during the kidnapping. I did not know the details. What happened that night was mostly kept from me. Perhaps they felt I would be upset, whereas their silence made it worse, more horrific. Rachel later would say nothing but I hate my mother! In any case, when The Darter had risen with her in his arms, and attempted to hand her over to my mother, my sister had begun to weep as if in close proximity to a demon.

She was not in her right mind, of course, then. She was exhausted. A seizure had been activated in her and she was probably never clear about the details of what had happened. I used to witness that often, when she’d look at me during the moments following a fit as if I were an actual devil. As if one of those love potions in A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been applied, only what you first saw on waking was not a love object but a source of fear, the source of a pummelling you had been through minutes before.

But this could not have been true for Rachel in that moment. Because the person she saw first was The Darter holding her in his arms, placating her, doing whatever was the right thing in order to guide her to a state of safety, as he had in her bedroom once, when he told me that unlikely story of his epileptic dog.

And another thing. No matter how my sister responded to me just after a fit, whether with suspicion or anger, a few hours later she would be playing cards with me or helping me with my maths homework. This did not happen with our mother. Rachel’s rough judgement of our mother would never abate. Rachel closed the door on her. She went instead to another boarding school that she disliked, in order to be away from her. “I hate my mother,” she would continue to say fiercely. I had imagined that our mother’s return would bring us back into her arms. But my sister’s hurt was irreconcilable. And when she saw the body of The Moth in the Bark Theatre lobby, she turned and began screaming at our mother, and it feels as if she has never stopped. Our family, already splintered, was splintered again. From then on, Rachel felt safer with strangers. It had been strangers who saved her.

That was the night The Moth finally left us. He had promised me once, by the light of a gas fire in Ruvigny Gardens, that he would stay with me until my mother came back. And he had. Then he slipped away from all of us that night when my mother returned.





One day, I left the Archives early to attend one of Rachel’s theatrical performances. We had not seen each other in a long time. I was aware of her avoiding me and I did not wish to invade her life. I knew she worked with a small puppet-theatre group, and heard she was living with someone, though she had never mentioned it to me. But now I had received a courteous if terse and noncommittal message from her, about a play she was involved with. She said I should not feel it was really necessary to be there, but the work was playing for three nights in an old barrel-maker’s factory. I found her message heart-breaking in its cautiousness.

The audience took up only a third of the seats, so people tried ushering us forward at the last minute into the front rows. I myself always sit at the back, especially during any show where a relative or a magician is involved, so I remained where I was. We sat in darkness for a long time, then the play began.

When the performance was over I waited by the exit. Rachel did not appear so I worked my way back through various doors and temporary curtains. There were two stagehands smoking in a cleared space, speaking a language I didn’t recognize. I mentioned my sister’s name and they pointed to a door. Rachel was looking at herself in a small hand mirror, removing the white paste she had worn from her face. There was a baby in a small basket beside her.

“Hello, Wren.” I moved forward and looked down at the baby, Rachel watching me. It was not her usual stare but a look balanced on two or more emotions, waiting for me to say something.

“A girl.”

“No, a boy. His name is Walter.”

Our eyes caught, held like that. It was safer to be without words just then. Omissions and silences had surrounded our growing up. As if what was still unrevealed could only be guessed at, in the way we had needed to interpret the mute contents of a trunk full of clothes. She and I had lost each other long ago in those confusions and silences. But now, beside this infant, we were within an intimacy, as when sweat covered her face after a seizure and I would hug her to me. When being wordless had been best.

“Walter,” I said quietly.

“Yes, dear Walter,” she said.

I asked her what it was like for her when we were under The Moth’s spell, admitting I always felt unsure around him. She turned on me. “Spell? He cared about us. You had no idea what was happening. He was the one protecting us. He was the one taking me to the hospital, again and again. You managed to ignore what our parents had done to us.”

She started to gather her things. “I have to go. I’m being picked up.”

I asked her what the music had been at one moment in the play, when she was left alone on stage, embracing a large puppet. It had almost brought me to tears. It was not really important, but there was so much I wanted to ask my sister that I knew she would not respond to. Now she touched my shoulder as she answered.