Warlight(8)

Some evenings, in the darkness of my walled garden during an October gale, I sense the walls shudder as they steer the east coast wind into the air above me, and I feel nothing can invade or break a solitude I’ve found in this warmer darkness. As if I am protected from the past, where there’s still a fear of recalling The Moth’s face lit by a gas fire while I asked question after question, trying to force an unknown door ajar. Or where I rustle awake a lover from my teenage years. Even if that time is a seldom visited place.

There was a period when architects were responsible not just for buildings but for rivers as well. Christopher Wren constructed St. Paul’s Cathedral but also converted the lower reaches of the Fleet, broadening its borders so it could be used for transporting coal. Yet with time the Fleet ended its life as a path for sewage. And when even those underground sewers dried up, their grand Wren-like vaulted ceilings and arcades became illegal meeting places beneath the city where people would gather during the night, in the no-longer-damp path of its stream. Nothing lasts. Not even literary or artistic fame protects worldly things around us. The pond that Constable painted dried up and was buried by Hampstead Heath. A thin tributary of the River Effra near Herne Hill, described by Ruskin as a “tadpole-haunted ditch,” whose waters he sketched beautifully, exists now possibly only in an archive drawing. The ancient Tyburn disappeared and was lost, even to geographers and historians. In much the same way I believed my carefully recorded buildings along Lower Richmond Road were dangerously temporary, in the way great buildings had been lost during the war, in the way we lose mothers and fathers.

—

What was it that allowed us to be so seemingly unconcerned about the absence of our parents? My father, whom we had seen board the Avro Tudor for Singapore, I’d barely known. But where was my mother? I used to sit on the top level of a slow-moving bus and peer down at the empty streets. There were parts of the city where you saw no one, only a few children, walking solitary, listless as small ghosts. It was a time of war ghosts, the grey buildings unlit, even at night, their shattered windows still covered over with black material where glass had been. The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less. Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?

Let me admit there were times I thought The Moth was dangerous. There was an unevenness to him. It was not that he was unkind to us, but he did not know, as a single man, how to speak the truth to children—and that is what it often felt like, The Moth breaking apart an order that should have existed safely in our house. You witness it when a child hears a joke that should be told only to an adult. This man we had thought of as being quiet and shy now seemed dangerous with secrets. So even if I did not wish to believe what he spoke of that evening beside the gas fire, I saved that information in my pocket.

During our first weeks alone with The Moth after our mother left, the house had only two visitors, The Pimlico Darter and the opera singer from Bigg’s Row. Coming home from school, I would notice her at times sitting at our dining table with The Moth, leafing through pages of sheet music and tracing the central musical path with a pencil. But that was before our home became crowded. Over the Christmas holidays the house had filled up with The Moth’s acquaintances, most of them staying late into the night, the conversations entering our bedrooms as we slept. At midnight I’d see the stairwell and living room brightly lit. Even at that hour the talk was never casual. There was always tension and inquiry over urgently needed advice. “What’s the most undetectable drug to give a racing dog?” was a question I heard once. For some reason my sister and I thought such conversations were not unusual. They felt similar to how The Moth and our mother had once talked about their war activities.

But who were they all? Were they people who had worked with The Moth during the war? The verbose beekeeper, Mr. Florence, apparently under a cloud for some unspoken misdemeanour in the past, could be overheard discussing how he’d learned his questionable talents for anaesthetics during the Italian campaign. The Darter claimed there was now so much illegal sonar activity on the Thames that the Greenwich Town Council suspected a whale had entered the estuary. It was clear The Moth’s friends stood a little to the left of the new Labour Party—about three miles or so. And our house, so orderly and spare when inhabited by my parents, now pulsed like a hive with these busy, argumentative souls who, having at one time legally crossed some boundary during the war, were now suddenly told they could no longer cross it during peace.

There was a “couturier,” for instance, whose name was never voiced, except with the nickname “Citronella,” who had swerved from a successful career as a haberdasher into working as a spy for the government during the war and now had eased himself back into being a couturier for minor members of the royal family. We had no idea what such people were doing in The Moth’s company, while we sat there toasting our crumpets at the gas fire after returning from school. The house seemed to have collided with the world outside.

The evenings ended with the sudden and simultaneous departure of everyone, and there would be silence. If Rachel and I were still awake, we knew by now what The Moth was preparing to do. We’d seen him a few times holding a record delicately in his fingers, blowing dust off it, wiping it gently with his sleeve. A crescendo began filling the downstairs. It was no longer the peaceful music we used to hear coming from his room when our mother was there. This felt violent and chaotic, without courtesy. What he chose to play at night on our parents’ gramophone felt more like a storm, something tumbling loudly from a great height. It was only after that ominous music was over that The Moth would play another record—a quiet voice singing alone—and after a minute or so I almost imagined a woman had joined in, someone I believed was my mother. It was what I waited for, and somewhere during that I fell asleep.