Warlight(43)

I spoke to no one. Another gentleman approached me and said, “Your mother was a remarkable woman,” and I did not even look up. In retrospect it was rude, but he had come to me as I was looking into the grave, at her narrow coffin in the fit of the earth. I was thinking the coffin maker and whoever had ordered it must have known how especially thin Rose Williams was. And known how she would have liked the black cherrywood, known that the chosen words of the service would not have appalled her or been ironic to her, and might have even chosen the line by Blake for the gravestone. So I was looking at what was three or four feet below me and thinking of all that when I heard the man’s quiet, almost shy voice speak. “Your mother was a remarkable woman.” And by the time I came to an awareness of courtesy, the tall man whom I had not acknowledged but who had respected whatever privacy I was in had moved away and I saw him only from behind.

After a while the churchyard was empty save for me and the Malakites. The Londoners and the few village people who had come to pay their respects were gone. The Malakites were waiting for me. I had not seen them since the news of her death, had only spoken with Sam on the telephone. I approached and then he did this thing. He opened his large moist badger coat wide—his hands were in its pockets—and enclosed me within it, next to his warm body, next to his heart. He was someone who’d barely touched me in all the time I had known him. He seldom inquired how I was doing, though I knew he was curious about what I might become, as if I were still green in judgement. I stayed the night at their house, the window of the spare bedroom looking down onto their walled garden. And the next day he drove me to White Paint. I had wanted to walk but he said he needed to speak with me. That was when he told me how she died.

No one else in the village knew what had happened. He had not even told his wife. My mother had died in the early evening and Mr. Malakite found her about noon the next day. It was clear she had died instantly. He carried Rose Williams—he called her by her full name as if suddenly there was no intimacy between them anymore—into the living room. Then he dialled the telephone number that she once had given him, as he was supposed to do if and when anything, anything, happened to her. Even before he called me.

The voice at the other end of the line asked for his name and to identify where he was. It asked him to confirm once more that she was dead. He was told to wait. There was then a pause. The voice returned and said he should do nothing. Just leave the premises. That he was to be silent about what had happened and also about what he had just done. Sam Malakite reached into his pocket and passed me the original note she had given him two years earlier, with the number he was to call. It was informal but carefully written, without emotion, though I felt I could read in its clarity and exactness an unvoiced sentiment, even fear. He dropped me off at the rise that looked down towards our house. “You can walk from here,” he said. Then I went towards my mother’s home.

I entered her stillness. I put some food outside for the feral cat. And I banged a saucepan before entering the kitchen, as she used to, to ward off the infamous rat.

Someone had been there, of course. There was not a mark on the sofa where Mr. Malakite had laid her down. Anything that might have provided a clue had been taken away. I guessed there would be a prompt and efficient investigation of her death, and that if there was any retaliation by the government it was sure to be invisible. I would not be notified. And there would be nothing in the house they did not want found. Unless she had left something casually, for me to pick up and place beside some conversational grain of sand she might have once mentioned. “Mr. Malakite reminds me of a friend of mine. Though Mr. Malakite is more innocent,” she had said. Only the word was not “innocent,” it was “benign.” Which was it? It was “benign,” I think. Somehow it matters. There’s a distinction.

For a while I did nothing. I circled the garden, and almost as if it was coincidence I could hear the call of a cuckoo moving round the house formally singing. When we were small our mother used to say, A cuckoo from the east means comfort, from the west luck, from the north sadness, from the south death. I searched for it, following the sound for a while, then entered the greenhouse, where she was supposed to have died. Whatever greenhouse panes had been shattered were now fixed. I kept recalling how I was seldom allowed to be alone in the house. And how she would always be eyeing me to see what I picked up or was interested in. Now that I was released from her watchful gaze, the rooms felt more potent. It grew dark outside. I pulled a few German paperbacks from the shelf to see if she had written her name in them, but she always had a printless foot. There was a book about Casanova in his later years, by a writer named Schnitzler. I took it upstairs with me and got into bed.

It must have been about eight in the evening when I did this, and I fell quickly into the strange compressed story of Casanova’s attempt to return to Venice in middle age, all of its action taking place over a period of a few days and fitting within the small canvas of a novella. I focused on the unexpected and convincing compassion towards Casanova. It was in German, and I was lost to time. As the story ended with Casanova’s sleep, I slept too, the bedside light on, the small book still in my hands.

I awoke in the bed I always slept in, turned off the bedside light, and found myself in the darkness of three in the morning, wide awake. I felt I needed to walk through the house with a different mind-set, the more European gaze of Schnitzler. Besides, it was now the hour when my mother was always awake.