Warlight(42)

—

She admitted to me once that my shadowy father had been better than anyone at building levees and firewalls against the past.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“Asia, perhaps?” The answer evasive. “He was a damaged man. We went our separate ways.” She swept her hand horizontally, as if wiping a table clean. My father, who had not been seen by us since that long-ago evening when he boarded the Avro Tudor.

A changeling discovers his own bloodline. So I was never to know him as well as I knew The Darter or The Moth. It was as if the two of them were in a book I was reading in my father’s absence and they would be the ones I learned from. I desired unstoppable adventures with them, or even a romance with a girl in a cafeteria who might fade from my life unless I acted, insisted. Because that was what fate was.

—

For a few days I tried breaking into other archives in the hope of discovering some presence of my father. But there was no evidence of him in any capacity, at home or abroad. Either there was no record of him there or his identity was more deeply classified. For this was a place where altitude took over, the higher echelons of the seven-storey building disappearing into a mist that had long ago cut its ties with the everyday world. A part of me wished to believe that here was where my father still existed, if anywhere. Not in some far reach of the empire, monitoring the Japanese military surrender, and going loco from heat, insects, the general complexity of post-war life in Asia. Perhaps all that was a blind fiction, like that promotion of his in the Far East, as opposed to what I wanted to imagine him doing, nearer to home—the evasive, smoke-like man, never referred to; not even, it seemed, existing in print.

For remembering how my father had a few times let me accompany him to his office in the city before his departure, showing me the large map where his various business dealings existed, the coastal harbours, and discreetly hidden island empires, I wondered if such offices had also served as intelligence centres during the war. Where was that office building in which my father explained how his company imported tea and rubber from the colonies, and where a lit map revealed a bird’s-eye view of the economic and political terrain of his universe? It may have been this very place for all I knew, or some other location that had once housed similar covert activities. What role did my father really have in the office he took me to when I was a boy? Because in such establishments I have discovered that the height of the floor means power. And that building reminds me now of nothing so much as the Criterion, where some of us worked in the basement laundries and steam-filled kitchens, never allowed to enter the higher reaches of the building, instead winnowed like fish at the gates and ladders so no one got higher than banquet halls and then only by putting on the disguise of a servile uniform. Had I already been in one of those cloud-hidden office heights with my father in my youth?

Once, almost as a joke or a quiz, I wrote a list of possible fates of our father, and sent it to Rachel.

Strangled in Johor.

Strangled on board a ship on his way to the Sudan.

Permanently AWOL.

Permanently undercover, but active.

In retirement at a facility in Wimbledon, paranoia invading him, constantly irritated by sounds coming from a nearby animal hospital.

Still on the top floor of the Unilever building.

I never heard back from her.

So many unlabelled splinters in my memory. In my grandparents’ bedroom, I had been shown formal pictures of my mother as a student but there was not one of my father. Even after her death, when I scurried around White Paint to discover whatever clues I could find of her life and death, I came across no photographic evidence of him. All I knew was that the political maps of his era were vast and coastal and I would never know if he was close to us or had disappeared into one of those distances forever, a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.



A Nightingale Floor

There was no coverage of my mother’s death in the newspapers. The death of Rose Williams caused little public response in the larger world she had once belonged in. Her small obituary identified her only as the daughter of an admiral, and did not mention a location for her funeral. There was, unfortunately, mention of her death in The Mint Light.

Rachel was not at her funeral. I tried reaching her when I was given the news, but there was no reply to my telegram. Still, there were a surprising number of people from out of town who attended, people I assumed my mother had worked with in earlier days. This in spite of the secrecy of the location.

She was buried not in the village near to us, but some fifteen miles away in the parish of Benacre in the Waveney district. It was there her funeral took place. My mother was not religious, but she had loved the simple bearing of that church. Whoever had organized the service must have known that.

It was an afternoon funeral. The chosen time allowed those who had come from London to catch the nine a.m. train from Liverpool Street and return afterwards on the late-afternoon train back to the city. Who, I wondered, as I looked at the group gathered around the grave, had planned all this? Who had chosen the line for her gravestone, “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.” When I asked the Malakites they claimed they did not know, though Mrs. Malakite thought it had all been done efficiently and tastefully. There were no journalists among the gathered, and those who came by car had the vehicles wait a few hundred yards from the graveyard’s entrance so no attention was drawn towards them. I must have appeared distant in my grief for my mother. I had been given the news at college just the previous day and the anonymous mourners no doubt regarded the eighteen-year-old boy by the grave as parentless and adrift. One of them did, at the end, come over and wordlessly shake my hand as if this were adequate consolation, before continuing his slow thoughtful walk out of the graveyard.