Warlight(47)

The following summer in London he kept in shape by scaling city buildings at night, including the recently built expansions to Selfridges. Someone had charted the emergency exits while the building had been going up, so he was there in rainstorms as well as clear weather. “Marsh Felon,” the woman’s voice said as if she had just recognized him, though he was in fact hanging on to a slowly loosening gutter with one hand. “Wait a minute.” “All right. It’s Ruth Howard, by the way.” “I know. I saw you a few nights ago on the east wall, above Duke Street.” “Let’s go for a drink,” she said.

At the Stork she told him about other good climbs she knew of in the city—a few Catholic churches, and Adelaide House along the river, were, she said, the most enjoyable. She told him more about Winthrop Young, as his Roof-Climber’s Guide was almost a New Testament to her. “He wasn’t just a climber, he won the Chancellor’s Medal for English Verse and he joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit as a conscientious objector in the Great War. My parents lived near him and knew him. He’s a hero to me.”

“Are you a conscientious objector?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Were you ever a student at Trinity?” he asked her later.

“Not really. I was looking for the right type of people.”

“Who did you find?”

“Someone I followed and picked up on the slopes of Selfridges. He bought me a drink.”

Felon found himself blushing.

“Because I caught your brother?”

“Because you told no one about it.”

“Am I the type, then?”

“I’m not sure, yet. Let you know, when I know. How did you fall?”

“I never fall.”

“You have a slight limp.”

“It was the boy in me that fell.”

“Even worse. Means it’s more permanent. The fear. You come from Suffolk….”

He nodded. Felon had given up guessing how and what she knew about him.

“When you fell, why did you fall?”

“We were thatchers.”

“Quaint.”

He said nothing.

“I mean it’s romantic.”

“I broke my hip.”

“Quaint,” she said again, making a joke out of herself. Then, “We need someone there on the east coast, by the way. Near where you used to live…”

“In what way?”

He was prepared for her to say almost anything.

“To keep an eye on certain people. We’ve finished one war, but there’s probably another coming.”

—

He studied maps she had given him of the east coast, all the small paths between its coastal towns, from Covehithe to Dunwich. And then the more detailed maps of farms belonging to people on her list. They had done nothing wrong, were only suspect. “We need to keep an eye on them in case of an invasion,” she’d said. “Their sympathies lie with Germany. You could slip in, leave no trace, a hit-and-run, as Lawrence calls it. And that tool…what is it called?”

“A long-flew knife.”

“Yes. Good name.”

He never saw the woman named Ruth Howard again, though he came across her name many years later in a confidential government report about the continuing, unforgiving turbulence in Europe, on a note attached to someone’s angry scrawl: We find ourselves in a “collage” in which nothing has moved into the past and no wounds have healed with time, in which everything is present, open and bitter, in which everything coexists contiguously….

It was a fierce note.

Still, Ruth Howard had been his introduction to secret wars. She’d taught him the “lost-roof technique” on the heights of Trinity, a phrase, she said, borrowed from Japanese art, where a high perspective, as from a belfry or cloister roof, allows you to see over walls into usually hidden distances, as if into other lives and countries, to discover what might be occurring there, a lateral awareness allowed by height.

And Ruth Howard was correct, he was a secretive. Few would know how or where Felon participated in the various conflicts that would smoulder through the next decades.



Wildfowling

Marsh drove up to White Paint in the dark, and he and the dog watched Rose walk towards the dimmed light of the car and climb into the back seat. Felon reversed, then aimed the car towards the coast. He drove for almost an hour. She was asleep against the liver-coloured dog. Now and then he looked at them. His dog. The fourteen-year-old girl.

At the estuary he let the animal out and set up the camouflage blind. He carried the guns in their hard oilcloth cases from the boot of the car back to where the dog stood, already poised as if stretching towards something out there over the muddy waterless estuary. It was that same unrecorded hour, almost nonexistent, that Marsh Felon was always fond of, with the tide beginning to come in, inch-deep at first. He could hear it in the dark. The only capsule of light anywhere was in the shell of the car where the girl was asleep, her door left open so the amber could be a marker, a compass point. He waited about an hour for the tide to enter and fill the estuary, then went back and held Rose’s shoulder till she wakened. She stretched, pushing her arms against the felt of the roof, then sat for a moment looking out into the dark. Where were they? Where was Felon’s dog?