Warlight(60)

We never know more than the surface of any relationship after a certain stage, just as those layers of chalk, built from the efforts of infinitesimal creatures, work in almost limitless time. It is easier to understand the mercurial, unreliable relationship that existed between Rose and Marsh Felon. As for the story of my mother and her husband, that ghost in her story, I have only the image of him sitting in that uncomfortable iron chair in our garden, lying about why he was leaving us.

I had wanted to ask her if she saw my father in me at all, or if she thought I might be like him.





It was to be my last summer with Sam Malakite. We were laughing and he leaned back on his heels and watched me. “Well, you have changed. You barely spoke the first season you worked with me.”

“I was shy,” I said.

“No, you were quiet,” he said, being more aware and conscious of what I had been than I was. “You have a quiet heart.”

—

Now and then, in an uninterested way, my mother asked how my work with Mr. Malakite was going, was it at all difficult?

“Well, there is no schwer,” I replied, and caught a rueful smile on her face.

“Walter,” she murmured.

So it was something he must often have said, even to her. I took a breath.

“What happened to Walter?”

A quietness, then, “What did you say you two called him?” She threw the book she was reading onto the table.

“The Moth.”

She’d lost the wry smile I had witnessed seconds earlier.

“Was there even a cat?” I asked.

Her eyes startled. “Yes, Walter told me about your talk. Why did you not remember the cat?”

“I bury things. What exactly happened to Walter?”

“He died protecting you both that night, at the Bark. The way he protected you when you were small, that time you ran away, after your father killed your cat.”

“Why were we not told he was protecting us?”

“Your sister realized. It is why she will never forgive me his death. I suppose he was the true father to her. And he loved her.”

“Do you mean he was in love with her?”

“No. He was just a man without children, who loved children. He wanted you safe.”

“I didn’t feel safe. Did you know that?”

She shook her head. “I think Rachel felt safe with him. I know you felt safe with him as a small boy….”

I stood up. “But why were we not told he was protecting us?”

“Roman history, Nathaniel. You need to read it. It is full of emperors who cannot tell even their children what catastrophe is about to occur, so they might defend themselves. Sometimes there is a necessity for silence.”

“I grew up with your silence….You know I leave soon, and I won’t see you until Christmas. This could be our last talk for a while.”

“I know, dear Nathaniel.”

—

It was September when I began college. Goodbye, goodbye. There was no embrace. I knew that every day she would at some point climb into the hills and reaching a crest look back at her house tucked safely into its fold of earth. Half a mile away would be the Thankful Village. She’d be at a great height, as Felon had taught her. A tall, lean woman coasting the hills. Almost certain of her defences.





When he comes, he will be like an Englishman, she had written. But the person who came for Rose Williams was a young woman, somebody’s heir. This is, I now tell myself, how it happened. Our mother never went into the village, but the villagers knew where Rose Williams lived, and the woman had come straight to White Paint, dressed as a cross-country runner, no props or disguises. Even that might have been obvious to my mother, but it was a dark October evening and it was too late when she made out the woman’s pale oval face through the condensation of the greenhouse window. She was standing there, still. Then broke the pane with her right elbow. She’s left-handed, my mother must have thought to herself.

“You are Viola?”

“My name is Rose, dear,” she said.

“Viola? Are you Viola?”

“Yes.”

It must have felt no worse than all the possibilities of death she had imagined, even dreamt about. Quick and fatal. As if it was finally an ending of feuds, of a war. Perhaps allowing a redeeming. That is what I think now. The greenhouse was humid and with the broken pane there was a breeze. The young woman fired again to make sure. And then she was running like a harrier over the fields as if she were my mother’s soul leaving her body, the way my mother herself had fled this house at the age of eighteen to go to university in order to study languages and meet my father during her second year, give up the idea of law school, have two children, and then flee us as well.





A WALLED GARDEN


A year ago I came across a book by Olive Lawrence in our local store, and that afternoon while I set up a humming twine to scare the scavenger birds in the garden, I kept waiting for evening so I could read it without interruption. Apparently it was the basis of a forthcoming television documentary, and so the next day I went out and bought a television set. Such an object has never been part of my life, and when it arrived it was a surreal guest in the Malakites’ small living room. It was as if I had suddenly decided to buy a boat or a seersucker suit.