Warlight(63)

“I remember those nights with you on the barge, with the dogs. Most of all.”

“Do you? Is that what you remember most?”

“Yes.”

He raised his cup in a silent ironic toast. He would not return to those years. “So how long are you here? What do you do with yourself?”

It felt to me that both questions, side by side, showed a lack of interest. So I told him without too much detail where I was living, what I did. I invented something for Rachel. Why did I lie? It may have just been the way he asked me. As if all the questions were insignificant. He appeared to want nothing from me. “Do you still import things?” I asked. He waved the remark away. “Oh, I go up to Birmingham once a week. I’m older, not travelling much now. And Sophie works in London.” He stopped there.

His hand smoothed the tablecloth and I got up eventually after too much silence from the man whose company I had at one time grown to love, after first disliking him and then fearing him. I thought I had experienced every aspect of him, the roughness, then the generosity. So it was difficult now to see him so static, to have every sentence of mine swept cleverly away to a dead end.

“I should go.”

“All right, Nathaniel.”

I asked if I could use his bathroom for a moment and went down the narrow hall.

I looked at my face in his mirror, no longer the boy who had travelled with him on those midnight roads, whose sister he had once helped save from an attack. I turned around in that small space as if the room had an unbroken seal, was the only place that might reveal something more of my wild, unreliable hero from the past, my teacher. I tried to imagine what kind of woman he had married. I picked up the three toothbrushes on the edge of the sink and balanced them on my palm. I touched and smelled his shaving soap on the shelf. I saw three folded towels. Sophie, whoever she was, had brought order to his life.

All this was surprising to me. All this was sad. He’d been an adventurer, and now I stood there, claustrophobic within his life. How calm and content he had appeared, pouring the tea, stroking the tablecloth. He who was always taking bites out of other people’s sandwiches while rushing to some questionable meeting, excitedly picking up someone’s dropped playing card on a street or waterfront, tossing the peel from a banana over his shoulder into the back seat of the Morris, where Rachel and I sat with the dogs.

I went out into the narrow hall and looked for a while at a framed piece of cloth embroidered with words. I don’t know how long I stood there looking at it, reading it, and rereading it. I put my fingers on it, then pulled myself away and very slowly walked to the kitchen. As if this was certain to be the last time I was here.

At the front door of The Darter’s flat, about to leave, I turned to say, “Thanks for the tea….” I was still not sure what to call him. I had never called him by his real name. The Darter nodded with a precise smile, enough of a smile so as not to appear rude or angry with me for invading his privacy, then closed the door on me.

—

I was miles away, caught up in the noise of the train back to Suffolk, before I allowed myself to gather our lives through the prism of that afternoon visit. There had been no attempt to forgive or punish me. It was worse. He did not wish me in any way to understand what I had done, with my quick and unwarned disappearance those years ago.

What led me to understand what had taken place in his flat was remembering what a great liar The Darter was. How, when surprised by a policeman or security guard at a warehouse or museum, he would improvise an unplanned lie that was so intricate and even so ridiculous that he would be laughing at it himself. People did not usually lie and find it funny at the same time, that was his disguise. “Never plan a lie,” he told me during one of those night journeys. “Invent as you go along. It’s more believable.” The famous counterpunch. And the way he always breasted his cards. The Darter had poured the tea so calmly, while his mind and heart must have been on fire. He barely looked at me as he spoke. He watched only the thin stream of ochre-coloured tea.

There was always care in Agnes for those around her. This is what I remembered most about her. She could be loud, argumentative. Tender with her parents. She clutched at all aspects of the world, but there was care. She had drawn the little portrait of us at our meal, then double-folded the butcher paper, so it was contained in what looked like a frame, and put it in my pocket. That is how she would hand over a gift, even something as worthless, as priceless, as that, saying, “Here, Nathaniel, for you.” And I, who was still a na?ve, coarse fifteen-year-old, had received it and kept it in silence.

We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here. But who did I hurt to get here? Who guided me to something better? Or accepted the few small things I was competent at? Who taught me to laugh as I lied? And who was it made me hesitate about what I had come to believe about The Moth? Who made me move from just an interest in “characters” to what they would do to others? But above all, most of all, how much damage did I do?

There had been a closed door ahead of me as I stepped from The Darter’s bathroom. Beside it, on the wall, was a framed piece of cloth with an embroidered blue sentence.