Warlight(54)

“I loved them,” he said. “Just like you.”

“I don’t think that’s it. I mean, to sleep with their daughter. And after their funeral?”

“You believe they are rolling in their graves?”

“Yes! Besides, now what? I know about your women. My father called you a boulevardier.”

“Your father was a gossip.”

“I think, after tonight, I am going to stay away from you. You’re too important to me.”

Even in this distilled, cautious version of Felon and Rose there is a confusion and even uncertainty about what may have happened, what may have been said; nothing quite fits within the rhyme of their story. Who was it, or what, exactly, would break off the relationship that began that night by an iron stove?

She had not been a lover as she had been this night for a long time. What would it be like for him, she wondered, to leave her after this? Would it be like one of his historical anecdotes, where a small army departed a Carolingian border town with courtesy and silence, or would everything around them clatter with repercussions? She would need to leave him before that happened, leave a pawn blocking the river bridge, so neither she nor he could cross it anymore, to make clear it was an ending after this sudden and remarkable glimpse of the other. It needed to still be her life.

She turned to face Felon. She rarely called him Marsh. It was almost always Felon. But she loved the name Marsh. It sounded as if he went on and on and was difficult to cross, to fully understand, that she would get her feet wet, that burrs and mud would attach themselves to her. I think it was then, after their night by the stove, that she decided to return safely to who she still was, and remain separate from him, as if suffering was always a part of desire. She couldn’t let her guard down with him. She would wait, however, a bit longer for full light, when the joyous lover he had been would once again become unknown to her, a mystery. At dawn she heard a cricket. It was September. She would remember September.





There is a moment during Felon’s questioning by the Italian woman when the interrogators swivel away the bright light that is blinding him, and it flares briefly past her face and he, always so damn quick to pick up what occurs around him, sees her clearly. He has, as someone said, “those strangely inattentive eyes that miss nothing.” And he notices the smallpox marks on her skin and judges her instantly as no beauty.

Do they intentionally make him aware of the woman questioning him? Can they tell that he is a sensualist, that he can be teased into a petite flirtation? And the brief revelation of the woman—what does that do to him? What is his response? Does it moderate his flirtation? Is he gentler, or more confident? And if they know that much about him, enough to place a woman on the other side of the arc light, hidden in the dark, is that movement of the light accidental or intentional? “Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life,” we are told.

But Felon in fact is always open to casual accident, a sudden dragonfly or the unexpected revelation of character, and he will play off it, wrongly or rightly. He is inclusive, just as he is broad-shouldered, boisterous in the company of strangers, all this an escape from his secretiveness. He has an openness that grows from having once been a discovering youth. His will is curious more than ruthless. So he needed a tactical executioner beside him, and he found that ability in Rose. He knows he is not the one they are after, but her—the unseen but regularly heard Viola—the woman intercepting their elusive signals over the airwaves, the voice reporting their movements, betraying their whereabouts.

Still, Felon is also a double-sided mirror. Thousands hear him as the genial broadcaster on The Naturalist’s Hour, mulling over the weight of an eagle or discussing the origin of the term “bolted lettuce,” as if he were a neighbour speaking over a shoulder-high fence, unaware of others overhearing him in faraway Derbyshire. Yet to all of them he is unseen as well as familiar. There has been no photograph of him in the Radio Times, only a pencil sketch of a man striding in the middle distance, far enough away to be unidentifiable. Now and then he may invite a specialist on voles or a tackle-and-fly designer into the basement studio of the BBC, and during such times try to be the humble listener. But his audience prefers it when he speaks for himself. They are accustomed to his roving mind, as when he unearths the John Clare line where “fieldfares chatter in the whistling thorn,” or recites a poem by Thomas Hardy about the devastation to small animals on the seventy or so fields where the Battle of Waterloo was fought.

The mole’s tunnelled chambers are crushed by wheels,

The lark’s eggs scattered, their owners fled;

And the hedgehog’s household the sapper unseals.

The snail draws in at the terrible tread,

But in vain; he is crushed by the felloe-rim.

The worm asks what can be overhead,

And wriggles deep from a scene so grim,

And guesses him safe….

It is his favourite poem. He reads the passage slowly and gently, as if in animal time.



The woman behind the glare of the arc light constantly alters the line of questioning to catch him unawares. He has chosen to confess to nothing but unfaithfulness and betrayal, perhaps thinking he might blind her with irritation. He has joked his way through the conversation with her on the other side of the lights, but I wondered: had they put a subtle woman in his path to ask him simple questions—allowing him to believe he is misdirecting her with personal details. But were his fictions revealing to her? She seeks a physical description of the woman they hold responsible. Sometimes her questions are obvious and they both laugh, he at her trickery, her laugh more thoughtful. Most of the time, even though exhausted, he recognizes the hidden intent in the question.