Warlight(41)

My mother turned in the darkness and looked at me. “Are you following the game on the board?”

“I am following it,” I said.

“Black is very soon in shambles. Now it is intermission. Everything has been occurring on stage—romantic love, jealousy, a wish to murder, notable arias. Norma has been abandoned and decides to kill her children. And all the while the audience has been watching the Duke of Brunswick’s box!

“In Act Two the plot continues. The black pieces are idle, pinned to their king, the knights frozen by Morphy’s bishops. Are you following?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Morphy now brings a rook into the attack down the centre of the board. He makes a series of sensational sacrifices in order to squeeze Black into an increasingly hopeless position. And he follows with the stylish queen sacrifice I showed you the other night that will quickly lead to mate. By the time the climax of the opera occurs, when the Consul and Norma decide to die together in a funeral pyre, Morphy can give all his attention to the music, leaving his opponents in ruins.”

“Wow,” I say.

“Please don’t say ‘Wow.’ You were only in America a few months.”

“It’s an expressive word.”

“Beginning with that Philidor Defence, it was as if Morphy had invented a great philosophical profundity on his way to the opera. That happens, of course, when you are not looking at yourself too carefully. And it happened that night. It is almost a hundred years later, and that little move in the shadows, across the footlights from Norma, is still recognized as genius.”

“What happened to him?”

“He retired from chess and became a lawyer, but was no good at it so he lived off the family money till he died, in his forties. Never played chess again, but he had his moment, with exceptional music.”

We looked at each other, we were both soaked. I had been conscious of the rain at first, then forgotten it. We stood by the entrance to a copse and far below us was our lit white-painted house. I sensed that she was happier here than she would ever be in that secure warmth. Here, where we were no longer housebound, there was an energy and lightness in her I rarely saw. We walked under the cold darkness of the trees. She had no wish to turn back, and we were there for some time, barely talking, private. This is how she must have appeared to others she worked with, I thought, during her silent wars, in the midst of those unknown contests.



My mother has heard from Mr. Malakite that a stranger has moved into a house a few miles from White Paint and has been uncommunicative as to where he is from as well as what his profession is.

She hikes alongside Rumburgh Wood, passes the moat farms southwest of the village of St. James, until she is in visual distance of the man’s house. It’s early evening. She waits until all the lights go out, then another hour. Finally she returns home through the darkness. The next day she appears again a quarter of a mile away, and watches the similar lack of activity. Until the gaunt man emerges in the late afternoon. She follows him cautiously. He circles the perimeter of the old aerodrome. He is going nowhere, really, she can tell that, he’s just on a ramble, but she stays with him until he returns home. Once more she waits in the same field, past the hour when nearly all of his lights are out. She makes her way closer to the house, changes her mind, and turns for home, again torchless in the dark.

She has a tentative chat the next day with the postman. “Do you talk with him when you deliver the mail?”

“Not really. He’s a scarce one. Doesn’t even come to the door.”

“What kind of mail does he get? Does he get a lot?”

“Well, I’m not allowed to say.”

“Really?” She almost laughs at him.

“Well. Books often. Once or twice a package from the Caribbean.”

“What else?”

“Apart from books, I’m not sure.”

“Does he have a dog?”

“No.”

“Interesting.”

“Do you?” he asks.

“No.”

The conversation has not been of much use to her, and she ends the chat, which the postman by now seems eager to pursue. Later, with official help, she is able to discover what exactly is being delivered to the stranger, along with what he is mailing out. As well as the fact he comes from the Caribbean, where his grandparents were indentured servants at a sugar plantation in the British colony there. It turns out he is some sort of writer, apparently quite well known, even in other parts of the world.

She learns to pronounce and repeat the stranger’s name to herself, as if it is a rare imported flower.





“When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….”

Rose had written this in one of her spare journals I found after her death. As if even in the privacy of her home, even in a secret notebook, she needed to be careful with the revelation of a possibility. She may even have muttered it mantra-like to herself. When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….

The past—my mother knew more than anyone—never remains in the past. So in the privacy of that notebook, in her home, in her own country, she knew she was still a target. She must have assumed that would be the disguise a person bent on vengeance would have to adopt in order to enter the depths of Suffolk and reach her without suspicion. The only clue to a motive would be that he would probably come from a zone of Europe where she had once worked, and where questionable decisions of war had been made. “Who do you think is going to come for you someday?” I would have asked her, if I had known. “What did you do that was so terrible?” And she would, I think, have said, “My sins are various.”