Warlight(44)

I moved slowly through each room with the torch, opening cupboards, dresser drawers. I searched my bedroom first of all. It had been hers when a schoolgirl, though nothing of that time was evident on the walls. Then her parents’ bedroom, frozen in their own era, left as it was since their death in the car accident. Then the third midsized room, which belonged to her, with its narrow bed, like her coffin. There was a Regency walnut desk inherited from her mother, where she often sat in the middle of the night, erasing as opposed to recording her past. It was where the barely used telephone in the house was. Mr. Malakite would have needed to come into this room to ring the number she had given him—perhaps in London, perhaps somewhere else.

In that walnut desk I did find, wrapped in one of my mother’s crumpled shirts, a framed picture of Rachel I had never seen before. As I studied it, it became clear it must have been taken during the period when my mother was away from us, supposedly unaware of our activities. I wondered who had taken it. The Moth? How conscious of us had our mother been when we were unconscious of her? The stranger aspect of the picture was that Rachel appeared to be dressed more like an adult, with an adult’s demeanour, than the teenager she was at the time. I had never seen her dressed like that.

By the end of my night search I had found nothing new, not even something forgotten on a top shelf of the cupboard in my bedroom. She had obviously scoured through it before suggesting I use it when I first came to stay during my holidays. All I had was the carefully framed and hidden picture of my sister, whom I realized I had not seen for over a year. It was about five in the morning now, and fully awake I decided to go downstairs. I walked down the stairs into a cold silence, and as I stepped on to the wooden floor at the foot of the stairs the nightingales began in the dark.

The suddenly loud squeaks would have woken anyone, as they had my mother a year earlier when I had come downstairs in the middle of the night. I’d simply been hungry then for some cheese and milk, and as I turned back captured within that chaotic noise, there was her figure already at the top of the stairs with something, I am not sure what, in her hand. When she saw me, she put it behind her back. Wherever I kept stepping for the next few moments—with her watching me, relieved but slightly scornful—the sounds kept revealing where I was in the semi-darkness. There was only one narrow edge of the floor a person could walk along to have silence. But now I was alone and simply walked down the hallway within the noise, until I entered her small carpeted living room with its fireplace, and the nightingale alarm stopped.

I sat down. My mind leapt strangely not to what my sister and I might have lost with Rose’s death, but to her earlier departure from us, when it felt we had lost so much more. I thought of her pleasure in re-naming us. It had been my father who insisted on my being called Nathaniel, but that was too long a word for my mother. So I had been “Stitch” to her. Just as Rachel became “Wren.” Where on earth is The Wren? Even with adult friends my mother enjoyed searching out better names than the ones they had been baptized with. She had plundered names from landscapes, called people by place-names of where they’d been born or even where she first met them. “There’s Chiswick,” she’d say about a woman she overheard on the radio, picking up a local accent. Such fragments of curiosity and information were always being shared with us when we were young. And she had taken all of that when she disappeared, waving goodbye. I thought of that erasing of herself, just as now, alone for the first time at White Paint, I realized I’d lost her living voice. All the quick-witted intelligence she owned when young, all the secret life she’d stepped into and kept from us, now lost.

She had reduced the house to a skeletal path. Her bedroom, the kitchen, the small living room that housed a fireplace, and the short passageway of books that led to the greenhouse. These were the locations of her life in the last years. A home once filled with country neighbours and grandchildren had been cut down to the bone, so during the two days I stayed after the funeral I saw more evidence of her parents than of her. I did come upon a few sheets of handwritten paper in a cupboard. One contained an odd meditation on her indoor rat as if it was a never-leaving guest she had in time become used to. There was a drawing to scale, probably by Mr. Malakite, of her garden. A constantly re-drawn map of the countries surrounding the Black Sea. But most of the cupboards were empty, as if someone had removed the essential evidence of her life.

I stood in front of her bookcase, modest for a person who lived alone in the country and who barely listened to the radio unless Mr. Malakite mentioned a storm warning. She must have been tired by then of other voices, save those she discovered in novels where a plot might swerve wildly and then somehow turn easily for home during the last two or three chapters. There were no ticking clocks in this stripped-down silent house. The telephone in her bedroom never rang. The only evident and therefore surprising source of noise was the nightingale floor. It comforted her, she told me, gave her safety. Otherwise, silence. During my holidays I could hear her give out a sigh or close a book in the next room.

How often did she return to the shelves of paperbacks, where she could be with Balzac’s Rastignac and Félicie Cardot and Vautrin. “Where is Vautrin now?” she once inquired of me drowsily, coming out of a sleep, perhaps unaware whom she was speaking to. Arthur Conan Doyle claimed he never read Balzac, not knowing where to begin, that it was too difficult to locate the sources or first appearance of any of the central characters. But my mother knew all of La Comédie Humaine, and I began wondering in which of the books she might have found a version of her own unrecorded life. Whose career did she trace, scattered within those novels, until she could understand herself more clearly? She would have known that Le Bal de Sceaux is the one book in La Comédie Humaine in which Rastignac does not appear, but also that within it he is being constantly referred to. On a whim I pulled a copy of it from the shelf, flipped through, and inside, tucked between pages 122 and 123, found a hand-drawn map of what looked to me like a chalk hill, on six-by-eight quarto-sized paper. With no place-names on it. A fragment that probably meant nothing.