Warlight(39)

“Where did you go? Just tell me something.”

“Everything changed the night when I was with you and Rachel here at White Paint, when we listened to the bombers flying over us. I needed to be involved. To protect you. I thought it was for your safety.”

“Who were you with? How did you know Olive?”

“You liked her, didn’t you…? Anyway, she was not only an ethnographer. I remember one time when she was with a group of meteorologists in gliders scattered over the English Channel. Scientists had been working all week recording wind speeds and air currents, and Olive was up there too, in the sky, forecasting the oncoming weather and the chance of rain to confirm or postpone the D-Day invasion. She was involved with other things too. But that’s enough.”

Her hand was still up, as if giving evidence, something she did not want to do. Then she turned round, bent down, and washed the blood off in the sink.

—

She began leaving books out for me, mostly novels she had read at college before marrying my father. “Oh, he was a great reader….That’s what probably brought us together…at first.” There were a great many Balzac paperbacks in French around the house, and I knew these were her passion. She seemed no longer interested in whatever the intrigues were in the outside world. Only someone like Balzac’s fictional character Rastignac interested her. I don’t think I interested her. Though perhaps she felt she ought to influence me in some way. But I don’t think she necessarily wanted my love.

Chess was her suggestion, a sort of metaphor, I suppose, for our intimate battle, and I shrugged in agreement. She turned out to be a surprisingly good teacher in the careful way she laid down the rules and movements of the game. She never proceeded to the next stage until she was sure I understood what I had just been taught. If I reacted with impatience, she began again—I couldn’t fool her with a nod of understanding. It was incessantly boring. I wanted to be out in the fields. And at night I couldn’t sleep because strategic pathways began suggesting themselves to me in the dark.

After my first lessons we started playing and she beat me mercilessly, then repositioned the fatal pieces to show how I could have escaped a threat. There were suddenly about fifty-seven ways to walk across an empty space, as if I were a cat with twitching ears entering an unknown lane. She spoke constantly as we played, either to distract me, or to say something crucial about focus, her role model being a famous chess victory of 1858 that was given the title “Opera” since it had actually been played in a private box overlooking a performance of Bellini’s Norma. It was music my mother loved, and the American chess player, an opera enthusiast himself, had glanced now and then at the action on stage while playing against a French count and a German duke who continually and loudly discussed their moves against him. The point my mother was making was about distraction. Priests were being bribed and murdered on stage and central characters would eventually be burned on a pyre, and all the while the American chess and opera enthusiast remained focused on the strategic path he’d chosen, undeterred by the glorious music. It was my mother’s example of peerless focus.

One night a thunderstorm perched at the top of our valley as we sat poised across from each other at a table in the greenhouse. There was a sodium lamp near us. My mother set up pawns and castles at their starting gates as the storm gradually rolled over us. The lightning and thunder made us feel defenceless within the thin glass shell. Outside, it could have been Bellini’s opera; inside, there was the drugged air of plants, and two bars of electrical heat attempting to warm the room. We moved our pieces in the faint constant yellow of the sodium lamp. I was playing her well, in spite of the distractions. My mother in her blue cardigan smoked, barely looking at me. All that August there had been storms, and then in the morning clear, fresh daylight, as if a new century. Focus, she’d whisper as we sat down within the storm’s gunfire and flare lights to another of our small contests of will. In a quarter second of lightning I saw her fall briefly into the wrong trench of the battle. I saw the obvious move I had been left, but then another that was wrong or that might be even better. I played it right away and she saw what I had done. The noise was all round us but now we both simply listened to it. A flood of lightning lit the greenhouse and I saw her face, her expression of—what? Surprise? A sort of joy?

So finally, a mother and a son.

—

If you grow up with uncertainty you deal with people only on a daily basis, to be even safer on an hourly basis. You do not concern yourself with what you must or should remember about them. You are on your own. So it took me a long time to rely on the past, and reconstruct how to interpret it. There was no consistency in how I recalled behaviour. I had spent most of my youth balancing, keeping afloat. Until, in my late teens, Rose Williams sat in a greenhouse and in the artificial heat of it played vicious competitive chess with her son, the only one of her two children who agreed to stay with her. Sometimes she wore a dressing gown that revealed her frail neck. Sometimes her blue cardigan. She’d lower her face into it so I could see just her distrusting eyes, tawny hair.

“Defence is attack.” Said more than once. “The first thing a good military leader knows is the art of retreating. It’s important how you get in and then how you get out undamaged. Hercules was a great warrior, but he died violently at home in a coat of poison, because of his earlier heroism. It’s an old story. The safety of your two bishops, for instance, even if you sacrifice your queen. No—don’t! Well, you played that, so this is what I do. An opponent will punish you for little mistakes. This will checkmate you in three moves.” And before she moved her knight, she leaned forward and tousled my hair.