Warlight(64)

I used often to lie awake

through the whole night,

and wish for a large pearl.

Below it, stitched with thread of a different colour, was a birthdate, with the month and the year. Thirteen years ago. There was no reason why The Darter should have known that a piece of embroidered cloth would give it away. “Sophie,” his wife, had made it for herself and the child. It was something she used to say to herself before she fell asleep. I remember. She probably would not even recall she had said the line to me once, or if she still remembered that night when we talked to each other in the darkness of that borrowed house. Even I had forgotten it until now. Besides, she would never have assumed I would reappear one afternoon, in her home, and see that wish of hers so evident on the wall.

And now a landslide, from a simple stitched sentence. I did not know what to do. Hers had been the story I never followed. How could I travel back through time to Agnes of Battersea, to Agnes of Limeburner’s Yard, where she’d lost that cocktail dress. To Agnes and Pearl of Mill Hill.

—

If a wound is great you cannot turn it into something that is spoken, it can barely be written. I know where they live now, on a treeless street. I need to be there at night and yell her name out so she can hear it, her eyes opening silently from sleep, and sit up in the darkness.

What is it? He will say to her.

I heard…

What?

I don’t know.

Go to sleep.

I suppose so. No. There it is again.

I keep calling and wait for her response.

—

I had not been told anything, but like my sister with her theatrical inventions, or Olive Lawrence, I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth. In retrospect the grains of sand had always been there: the fact that no one had spoken to me of Agnes when I assumed they might have, the now understandable cold-blooded silence of The Darter in his flat towards me. And the folded towels—she had after all been a waitress, a washer and cleaner like me in various kitchens, and lived in a small council flat, where neatness was a necessity. The Darter must have been amazed by such rules and beliefs in a pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who would go on to cordon off the bad habits of his life so efficiently.

I imagine the two of them—with what? Envy? Relief? Guilt that I had not known what I was responsible for till now? I thought how they must have judged me. Or was I the unspoken subject in much the way The Darter had responded to Olive Lawrence’s television programme, as well as her book that he had never picked up. A dismissal of us all…he didn’t have time now, he needed to travel to the Midlands once a week, there was a child to raise, the times were sparse and hard.

A few weeks after Agnes discovered she was pregnant, and with no one else she felt able to speak to about it, she had taken one bus, then another, and got off near The Pelican Stairs, where The Darter lived. She had not seen me for over a month and assumed that was where I was. It was dinnertime. There was no answer at the door, so she sat on the steps while the street darkened around her. When he did return home she was asleep. He touched her awake, she didn’t know where she was, then recognized my father. So that upstairs, when she told him her situation, not knowing where I was or where I had gone to, The Darter had needed to confess another truth, as to who he really was, and the way he really knew me, and where I might have gone or been taken.

They sat there all night in his narrow flat, beside a gas fire; it was like a confessional. And during and after the several repeated and circular conversations to calm her disbelief, did he tell her what he did, what his profession was?

A short while ago I saw an old film revived in a cinema where the central character, an innocent man, is wrongly convicted and his life ruined. He escapes from a chain gang but will be forever on the run. In the last scene of the film he meets the woman he loved in his earlier life but can be with her only briefly, knowing he is in danger of being caught. As he steps back, away from her into the darkness, she cries out, “How do you live?” And our hero, played by Paul Muni, says, “I steal.” And with that last sentence the movie ends, and the film darkens, closing on his face. When I saw that film, I thought of Agnes and The Darter, and wondered when and how she had discovered the illegality of what he did. How she had dealt with this knowledge of her husband’s insecure criminality in their life together, in order that they could survive. Everything I remembered about Agnes I still loved. She had pulled me out from my youthful privacy by making me so fully aware of her. But she also was the most truthful person I knew. She and I had broken into houses, stolen food from the restaurants we worked in, but we were harmless. She argued at dishonesty or unfairness. She was truthful. You did not damage others. What a wondrous code to already have at that age.

So I thought of Agnes and this man she had liked so much, the one she believed was my father. When and how did she discover what he did? There are so many questions I want answered by some version of the truth.

“How do you live?”

“I steal.”

Or did he keep that from her a little longer, until another meeting on another night in that narrow Pelican Stairs flat? One solution, one resolution at a time. First this. And then that. And only afterwards would he say what he was willing to do, and it was no longer one of those moments in a love song he hummed to himself about how everything occurred spontaneously through quick cause and effect, so that one fell in love while down by the shore an orchestra was playing. No longer the simplicity of coincidence, happenstance. There was, I knew, a great affection between them. They had that to go forward with, alongside their different ages and suddenly different roles. There was no one else, in any case.