Warlight(49)

So this afternoon on her parents’ lawn at White Paint is the first time she has seen him in years. Where has he been, she wonders. Still, it’s now her birthday, and he has surprised her by arriving at her mother’s lunch for her with this gift of a fishing rod. And as they meet they promise to save each other an hour’s walk alone. “I have the blue-winged olive nymph you once made,” she says. It feels like a confession.

But she has become a stranger for him, that taut frame altered and tethered permanently to the child. She is less private, less vigilant, he does not know what it is, exactly, but he feels she has given up what she was, in some way. There was a pouncing manner in her he liked, which is no longer there. And then as she sweeps a cedar branch out of her way he recognizes the faint line of bones at her neck that brings his affection back to what he thought was no longer there.

So he proposes an idea of work to this brightest of women to whom he had once taught all manner of things: that list of the oldest rocks in the county in order of age; the best wood for an arrow, for a fishing rod—the wood she has just recognized by its smell as she held his gift to her face, when he saw the thrill of her smile. Ash. He wants her in his world. He knows nothing about her adult life, that she was, for instance, hesitant and shy longer than was perhaps usual, till she stepped towards what she desired with a determination from which none could prise her away—a habit she will always have, that pattern of hesitancy at first and then complete involvement—just as later on, in the coming years, nothing will draw her away from Felon, no logic of her husband, not even the responsibility of her two children.

Is it Felon who chooses her, or is this something Rose always wished for? Do we eventually become what we are originally meant to be? It may not have been a path built by Marsh Felon at all. Perhaps such a life was what she always wanted, the journey she knew she would at some time leap towards.

—

He buys and slowly rebuilds an abandoned cottage that makes him a distant neighbour to White Paint. But the small cottage stays mostly uninhabited, and when there he is always alone. His role as host of The Naturalist’s Hour on BBC Radio, which is heard on Saturday afternoons, displays perhaps his truest nature in those public soliloquies on newts, river currents, the seven possible names for a riverbank, the grayling flies made by Roger Woolley, the varying wingspans of the dragonfly. It is much the way he conversed with Rose whenever they crossed fields or riverbeds. Marsh Felon as a boy housed lizards in his fingers, swept up crickets with his palm and released them into the air. Childhood had been intimate and benign. That was him as he may originally have wished to be, the amateur lover of the natural world he entered whenever he could.

But he is by now “a secretive,” with an unnamed position in a government office, and journeying into unstable zones of Europe, so there will be unknown stages in his story. Some theorize that what gives Felon skill in intelligence work derives from his knowledge of animal behaviour—one person recalled Felon making him sit on the bank of a river while explaining warcraft as he fished. “In these local rivers it’s the art of coaxing—everything is a waiting game.” And another time, as he cautiously dismantled an old wasps’ nest, remarking, “You need to know not just how to enter a battle zone but how to get out of it. Wars don’t end. They never remain in the past. ‘Seville to wound, Córdoba to die in.’ That’s the important lesson.”

Sometimes when he returns to The Saints he catches sight of his family gathering reeds from the marshes, the way he had done as a boy. Two generations back their grandfather had planted reeds along the river marshes, and now his heirs harvest it. There is still no pause within their conversations, but their loud words are now unshared with him and he will not hear of their disappointments in a marriage or their pleasure in a new child. He had been closest to his mother—being hard of hearing had been her defence against their endless talk, and when Marsh read a book it was similar to that comfort of deafness. Now the brothers keep their distance from him, weaving together their own communal stories, for instance about an anonymous thatcher on the coast who took the name of “Long-Flew Knife,” prepared, it was said, to kill German sympathizers in the event of an invasion. It was a country myth that spread in whispers. There had been a killing with such a blade, seemingly random, some said part of a local row. From the height of a one-storey roof his brothers looked towards the coast and spoke of it, the name of a thatcher’s tool suddenly known in every village.

No, Marsh lost them long ago, even before he left The Saints.

—

But how did he become what he became, this rural boy curious about the distant world? How did he work his way into a war-skilled gentry? He had been a youth who at twelve could sail a lure and land it faultlessly on a river surface, then swing it across the current to drift towards the presence of a trout; at sixteen he would change his unreadable handwriting to clearly record the design and tying of flies. He needed to be exact about this passion—cutting, sewing the camouflage of dry flies. It filled the silence of his days when he could make a grayling fly blindfolded, even with a high fever, even in high winds. By his mid-twenties he had memorized the topography of the Balkan States, and had an expert knowledge of old maps where distant battles had been fought, now and then journeying to some of those innocent fields and valleys. He learned as much from those who barred the door to him as from those who let him in, gained a slow informal knowledge of women who were to him more like hesitant foxes he once had held briefly and endearingly in his arms as a boy. And by the time a war grew again in Europe, he had become a “Gatherer” and “Sender Out” of young men and women, luring them into silent political service—because of what? perhaps some small anarchy he glimpsed in them, an independence they needed to fulfill—and releasing them into the underworld of the new war. A group that eventually included (unknown to her parents) Rose Williams, the daughter of his neighbours in Suffolk, my mother.