Warlight(38)
But for me, that teenager, Sam Malakite represented only details from the world he lived in. I never imagined him as part of the world of arson or cordite. He was the most easygoing and stable person I’d encountered. For excitement on Wednesdays, on the way to work we picked up the four-page news sheet that was printed privately by the Reverend Mint, the pastor, who saw himself as the local Kilvert. The man did little for the community but give one sermon a week to a congregation of around twenty people. But there was his newspaper. His sermon and the newspaper forcibly dovetailed any local incidents into a moral parable. Someone having a fainting spell in the bakery, a telephone ringing constantly at the corner of Adamson Road, the stealing of a carton of wine gums from the confectionery, the misuse of the word “lay” on the radio—these worked their way into the sermon and then again into The Mint Light, with spiritual content hanging on for dear life.
In The Mint Light, an attack from Mars would have been ignored. This had even been its policy between 1939 and 1945, when it recorded mostly local complaints such as the presence of rabbits in the victory gardens. Thursday, 12:01 a.m., a police officer felt “emotional” during a thunderstorm while making his last patrol of the night. Sunday, 4:00 p.m., a female motorist was flagged down by a man carrying a ladder. By the time of the Sunday sermon, the borrowing of a ladder without permission or a schoolboy’s shining of a torch at a neighbour’s cat, “attempting to hypnotise it with a swaying and circular motion,” had profound biblical overtones, the hypnotized cat easily linked to Saint Paul being blinded by rays on the way to Damascus. We bought The Mint Light and read sections aloud in ominous tones, nodding wisely and simultaneously rolling our eyes. Mr. Malakite believed his own death as the town’s market gardener would be linked to the feeding of the five thousand. No one read The Mint Light more carefully than we did. Except, strangely, my mother. When Mr. Malakite drove me home on Wednesdays, she always invited him in for tea and fish-paste sandwiches, took The Mint Light from him, and withdrew on her own to a desk. She read it without any laughter, and I realize now that my mother was searching not for the absurd spiritual metaphors but to discover if there was any reference to a possible stranger in the vicinity. She tended to see no one but Mr. Malakite, or now and then the postman. She even insisted on having no pets. As a result there was a feral cat who lived outside and a rat who lived indoors.
My nomadic school life had made me tactful as well as self-sufficient, not fond of confrontations. I avoided the schwer. I retreated from arguments as if I had those epicanthic eyelids that birds and some fish have, that allow them to separate themselves silently, almost courteously, from present company. I shared with my mother a preference for privacy and solitude. A room without argument and a sparse table appealed to both of us.
Only in our habits of clothing was there a difference. My journeying from place to place had made me responsible for my neatness. Something like ironing my own clothes gave me a sense of control. Even for working in the fields with Mr. Malakite I washed and ironed what I wore. Whereas my mother would hang a blouse to dry on a nearby bush, then simply put it on. If there was scorn in her towards my fussiness she said nothing; perhaps she did not even notice it. But when we sat across a table from each other I was conscious of her lean, clear-eyed face above an unironed shirt that she felt was good enough for the evening.
She surrounded herself with silence, barely listened to the radio unless there was a dramatic adaptation of something like Precious Bane or Lolly Willowes, those classics she’d read as a teenager. Never the news. Never political commentary. She could have been in a world that existed twenty years earlier, when her parents lived at White Paint. This vacuum-like silence only emphasized the distance between the two of us. In one of the few no-holds-barred arguments with my mother, when I complained about our abandonment, she responded too quickly, “Well, Olive was around you for a while. She kept me up-to-date.”
“Wait a minute—Olive? You knew Olive Lawrence?”
She drew back, as if she’d revealed too much.
“The eth-nog-ra-pher? You knew her?”
“She was not just an ethnographer, Stitch!”
“What else was she?”
She said nothing.
“Who else? Who else did you know?”
“I kept in touch.”
“Wonderful. You kept in touch. For your sake! I am so glad. You left us without a word. Both of you.”
“I had work to do. I had responsibilities.”
“Not to us! Rachel hates you so much she will not even talk to me. Because I’m here with you she hates me too.”
“Yes, I have been damned, by my daughter.”
I picked up the plate in front of me and flung it underhand viciously towards a wall as if that would finish our conversation. Instead the plate arced up, hit the edge of the cupboard, and broke, and a section of it leapt twisting towards her and cut into her forehead just above her eye. Then the noise of it falling to the floor. There was a pause, we were both still, blood coursed down the side of her face. I moved towards her but she held up her hand to keep me away, as if in scorn. She stood there impassive, stern, not even putting her hand up to her forehead to search out the wound. Just continued holding that palm out against me, to stop me from approaching, to stop me attempting to care for her, as if this was nothing. There had been worse. It was the same kitchen where I’d witnessed the series of wounds on her arm.