Warlight(59)

She returns to his room, watching for any small movement in him, in case this is false sleep. Pauses, realizes that if she leaves now she will never be sure. Slips off her shoes and moves forward. Lowers herself onto the bed and stretches out beside him. My ally, she thinks. She remembers small particles of their history she will never be able to let go of, some forgotten whisper of confidence, some grip of his hand, a recognition across a room, him dancing with an animal in a field, how he learned to speak clearly and slowly on The Naturalist’s Hour so his near-deaf mother could understand him during those Saturday afternoons, how he knotted and bit the fine nylon when he completed that blue-winged olive nymph. When she was eight. When he was sixteen. That was only the first layer. There were more private depths. Him lighting a stove in a cold, dark cottage. The almost silent notes of a cricket. Then, later, him in a hut in Europe, standing up, leaving Hardwick asleep on the hut floor. All the scars on her arm he has not seen. She rolls onto her side to look at his face. Then she will leave. This is where you are, she thinks.





So much left unburied at the end of a war. My mother returned to the house built in an earlier century, which still signalled its presence over the fields. This had never been a hidden place. You could make out its whiteness almost a mile away as you listened to the rustle of pines surrounding you. But the house itself was always silent, a fold in the valley protecting it. A place of solitude, with water meadows sloping to the river, and where if you stepped outside on a Sunday you might still hear the bell from a Norman church miles away.

Rose’s most insignificant confession to me during our last days together may have been the most revealing. It was about this house she had inherited. She ought to have chosen a different landscape, she said. Her wish for disinheritance or exile had been proclaimed years earlier when she separated herself from her parents, hiding from them what she was doing during the war, and becoming unknown even to her children. Now her return to White Paint was, I assumed, what she wanted. But it was an old house. She knew each slight incline of hall, every stiff window casing, the noise of winds during different seasons. She could have walked blindfolded through its rooms into the garden and stopped with assurance an inch from a lilac. She knew where the moon hung each month, as well as which window to view it from. It was her biography since birth, her biology. I think it drove her mad.

She accepted it not just as safety or assurance, but as fate, even that loud noise from the wooden floor, and the realization of this shook me. It was built in the 1830s. She would open a door and find herself in her grandmother’s life. She could witness the generations of women in their labours with a husband’s visit now and then, and child after child, cry after cry, wood fire after wood fire, the bannister smoothed from a hundred years of touch. Years later I would come across a similar awareness in the work of a French writer. “I thought about it some nights till it almost hurt…saw myself preceded by all those women, in the same bedrooms, the same twilight.” She had witnessed her mother in such a role when her father was at sea, or in London returning only on weekends. This was the inheritance she had come back to, the prior life she had run from. She was once more back in a small repeating universe that included few outsiders—a family of thatchers working on the roof, the postman, or Mr. Malakite arriving with sketches for the greenhouse he was building.

—

I asked my mother—it was probably the most personal question I asked her—“Do you see yourself in me at all?”

“No.”

“Or do you think I might be like you?”

“That is of course a different question.”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s the same.”

“No, it isn’t. I suspect there might be a similarity and connection. I’m distrustful, not open. That may be true of you. Now.”

She had gone way beyond what I was considering. I was thinking of something such as courtesy or table manners. Though her present solitary life had not made her courteous. She had little interest in what others were up to, as long as they left her alone. As for table manners, she’d shaved the consumption of meals down to an aerodynamic minimum: one plate, one glass, with the table wiped clean ten seconds after the roughly six-minute meal was over. Her daily path through the house was so ingrained a habit she was unaware of it unless it was interrupted. A conversation with Sam Malakite. Or a long walk into the hills while I was working with him. She felt protected by what she believed was her total insignificance and anonymity to those in the village, while within the house there was the nightingale floor—that landmine of noises which would signal any intruder entering her territory. Her nightingale in the sycamore.

But that eventual stranger she expected never stepped indoors.

“Anyway, why?” She now insisted on continuing our small conversation. “What were you thinking could have been the same between the two of us?”

“Nothing,” I said smiling. “I thought perhaps table manners, or some other recognizable habit?”

She was surprised. “Well, my parents always said, as everyone’s parents probably did, ‘Someday you may be eating with the king, so watch your manners.’?”

Why had my mother chosen to alight on just those two thin branches she saw as questionable skills or weaknesses in herself? “Distrustful” and “not open.” I understand now how she might have needed to learn those qualities in order to protect herself in her work, as well as in her marriage to a destructive and disappearing man. So she broke out from her chrysalis and slipped away to work with Marsh Felon, who had broadcast those seeds of temptation when she was young. His was the faultless campaign of a Gatherer. He had waited, drawing her into the Service in much the same way he himself had been drawn in, almost innocently. Because what she wanted, I suspect, was a world she could fully participate in, even if it meant not being fully and safely loved. “Oh, I don’t want to be just worshipped!” as Olive Lawrence had announced once to Rachel and me.