Warlight(50)

Night of the Bombers

On weekends Rose drives up to Suffolk to visit her children who are living with her mother, safe from the Blitz that is terrorizing London. During one visit, on her second night there, they hear the bombers flying in from the North Sea. A long night. They have all established themselves in the living room of the darkened house, the children sleeping on the sofa, her mother, tired, kept awake by the noise of the planes, sitting by a fire. The house, the earth around it, does not stop shuddering, and Rose imagines all the small animals, voles, worms, even night owls and lighter birds in the air, caught in the avalanche of noise coming from the sky—even fish in the rivers under the turbulence of water because of the never-ending planes from Germany coursing low through the night. She realizes she is thinking the way Felon thinks. “I need to teach you how to protect yourself,” he said once. He’d been watching her cast. “The way a fish—if he sees your line land—will work out where it comes from. He learns to protect himself.” But Felon is not there this particular night of the bombers while she and her mother and children are alone in the darkness of White Paint, with only the face of the radio lit, which speaks quietly about parts of the city—Marylebone, sections of the Embankment—that are already in ruins. A bomb has landed near Broadcasting House. There are unimaginable casualties. Her mother doesn’t know where her father is. It is only the children, Rachel and Nathaniel, her mother and she, who are supposedly safe in this noisy countryside, waiting for the BBC to tell them something, anything. Her mother nods off, then is startled awake by more planes. They were speaking earlier about where Felon might be, and her father. Both somewhere in London. But Rose knows what her mother wants to talk about. As the planes quieten, she hears her say, “Where is your husband?”

She says nothing. The planes recede into the darkness, heading west.

“Rose? I was asking—”

“I don’t know, for god’s sake. He’s overseas, somewhere.”

“Asia, is it?”

“Asia is a career, they say.”

“You should never have married so young. You could have done anything after university. You fell in love with a uniform.”

“As you did. And I thought he was brilliant. I didn’t know then what he had been through.”

“The brilliant are often destructive.”

“Even Felon?”

“No, not Marsh.”

“He’s brilliant.”

“But he is also Marsh. He wasn’t born into this world. He’s the accident, with, it seems, a hundred careers—thatcher, naturalist, an authority on battle sites, and whatever else he is now….”

There is again a weight of silence from her mother. Rose eventually stands up and goes to her, and in the firelight she sees her peacefully asleep. Everyone has their own marriages, she thinks. After the recurring bouts of thunder from the planes her children are asleep on the sofa, defenceless. Her mother’s pale fine hands are on the armrests of her chair. Northeast of them is Lowestoft, southeast is Southwold. All along the coast, the army has buried mines on the beaches to protect against a land invasion. They have commandeered homes, stables, and outbuildings. At night everyone disappears, and five-hundred-pound bombs and high-explosive incendiaries whistle down on the sparsely populated houses and streets, so it seems as light as day. Families sleep in cellars, moving their furniture in with them. Most of the children have been evacuated away from the coast. The German planes returning to Europe will jettison their remaining bombs as they head back. So the only evidence of inhabitants comes after the sirens cease and they gather on the Front Parade to gaze at the sky and watch the planes departing.

Rachel struggles awake just before dawn. Rose takes her by the hand and they walk out into the stilled fields, down to the river. Whatever route the bombers took they have not come back this way. The water is flat, undamaged. They hold on to each other and walk along the bank in the dark, then sit, waiting for light. It is as if everything is hiding. “The important thing is I need to teach you to protect those you love.” She still has some of Marsh’s long-ago words in her. The morning gets warmer and she removes her sweater. Nothing moves in the shell-shocked water. Her bladder is full but she keeps it that way as part of a prayer. If she does not crouch down, if she does not piss, they will all be safe, in London as well as here. She wants somehow to participate, to control what is happening around her. In this time of unsafety.

“A fish camouflaged in shadow is no longer a fish, just a corner of landscape, as if it has another language, the way we need to be unknown sometimes. For instance, you know me as this person, but you don’t know me as another person. Do you understand?”

“No. Not quite.” And Felon explained it to her again, glad she did not just say “Yes” to him.

An hour later Rose walks with Rachel towards the faint outline of the house. She is trying to imagine Felon’s other lives. At times it feels he is more innocently himself only when he has a creature in his arms or a parrot on his shoulder. His parrot, he has told her, repeats everything it hears, so he can say nothing of importance in its vicinity.

She realizes it is this unknown and unspoken world she wants to participate in.



Quiver

When people in the Service who knew him spoke casually of Felon in public places, any reference to an animal would do. And the range of creatures chosen to depict him often led to comic extremes. The New World porcupine, a diamondback snake, the madrigal weasel—whatever came to mind at that moment was not important, being there only for camouflage. It was this range of creatures assigned to Felon that suggested how unknowable he was.