Warlight(37)

He paid the bill and at the door we shook hands. There was an emphasis in his goodbye as if it was permanent and we two would not meet again like this. Years ago at Victoria Station, he had approached me in a way almost too close for comfort and bought me a cup of tea in the cafeteria. I had not known then that he was my mother’s colleague. Now he walked from me at a quick pace, as though relieved to get away. I still had no inkling about his life. We had circled each other for a long time. This man, content to be silent about his bravery the night he had saved us, when my mother returning into my life had touched my shoulder, and using my old nickname, said “Hello, Stitch.” Then went quickly towards him, opening his bloodied white shirt, interrogating him about the blood.

Whose blood is it?

It’s mine. Not Rachel’s.

Under McCash’s dazzling white shirts would always be the scars, reminders of the time he had protected me and my sister. But now I knew he had kept our mother informed about us, had been her secret camera at Ruvigny Gardens. Just as The Moth, as Rachel said, had cared for us more than I realized.

I thought back to a weekend when The Moth and I had stood at the edge of the Serpentine watching Rachel stride into the water towards something she wished to rescue, lifting her dress, her bare legs meeting her upside-down body. Was it a piece of paper? A bird with a broken wing? It doesn’t matter. What was important was that when I glanced over at The Moth, I saw he was watching Rachel intensely, not just for what she herself was, but with a permanent concern for her. And all through that afternoon I recalled Walter—let us call him Walter now—had stared at anyone who came near us as if there might be some flaw of danger. There must have been days—all those times when I was not with them while busy with The Darter—when The Moth’s eyes were focused on Rachel, in this protective way.

But now I knew that Arthur McCash had been a guardian too, coming by once or twice a week to keep an eye on us. But what I felt towards him as he walked away after our dinner was what I felt when I was fifteen. He was still that solitary presence, recently down from Oxford with his infamous limerick and with no sense of an authentic landscape behind him. Though if I had inquired about his school days, I am sure he could have described the colours on his school scarf or his boardinghouse, probably named after some English explorer. In fact, at times Ruvigny Gardens still feels to me like an amateur theatre company where a man named Arthur rushes on to perform his awkward conversations and when that is over walks off into—what? It was a role scripted for him, the minor character, and it led eventually to him being sprawled on a backstage sofa at the Bark Theatre with blood filling his white shirt and soaking the top of his trousers. A moment that had to remain classified, off stage.

But the tableau of that night keeps returning: my mother moving towards him, dragging a chair with her, the weak wattage of the one lamp in the room, and her beautiful neck and face bending down to kiss his cheek briefly.

“Can I help, Arthur?” I hear her say. “A doctor will come….”

“I’m all right, Rose.” She looks over her shoulder at me, unbuttons his shirt, pulls it loose from his trousers to discover how serious the knife slashes are, slides the cotton scarf off her neck to swab the welling blood. Reaches for the vase.

“He didn’t stab me.”

“Slashes. I see that. Where is Rachel now?”

“She’s all right,” he says. “She’s with Norman Marshall.”

“Who’s that?”

“The Darter,” I say across the room. And she turns to look at me again as if surprised there is something I know that she doesn’t.





A WORKING MOTHER


I traced the trail of my mother’s swift departure from Intelligence after her return, as she severed all connections then moved with no fanfare to Suffolk, while Rachel and I completed our last years at far-flung schools. So having had no mother during the time when she worked in Europe, we now had no mother during the period that followed, as she evolved back into being an anonymous civilian, erasing her false names.

I came across memos, from after she had left the Service, warning her that the name Viola had cropped up again in a recent document, and there was the possibility that those who had been searching for her had not given up. She responded by refusing the proposal of “bodies from London” to protect her, deciding instead to find someone outside her professional circle to watch over the safety, not of her, but of her son when he was with her. Therefore, unknown to me, she persuaded the local market gardener, Sam Malakite, to visit our house and offer me a job. No one from my mother’s former universe was invited into our surroundings.

I had no suspicions that people were still searching for a Rose Williams, and I was unaware of the protection I was being given. It was only after her death that I discovered she always surrounded her children—even Rachel in her distant Welsh landscape—with various guardian owls. So Arthur McCash had been replaced by Sam Malakite, a market gardener who never carried a weapon, unless you considered his three-pronged hand shovel or his hedging tools.

I recall asking my mother once what had made her begin to like Mr. Malakite, for it was clear she was very fond of him. She was on her knees in the garden attending to nasturtiums and she leaned back, looking not at me but into the distance. “I must say, it was when he interrupted a conversation we were having to say, ‘I think I smell cordite.’ Perhaps it was the casual, unexpected word in the remark that pleased me so. Or energized me. It was a branch of knowledge I was familiar with.”