Warlight, Page 3

  “If she’s not there, is he not there too?”

  “He is there.”

  “Why is he there if she isn’t?”

  Silence.

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must know. You worked out the thing with the school.”

  “I did that on my own.”

  “You are in touch with her. You said.”

  “Yes. I said that. But I don’t know where she is right now.”

  He held on to my hand in that cold basement until I got free of him and returned upstairs to sit by the gas fire in the unlit living room. I heard his steps come up, ignore the room where I was, then go up to his attic rooms. When I think of my youth, if you asked me to quickly remember just one thing, it would be the dark house that night during the hours after Rachel disappeared. And whenever I come across that strange phrase, “hell-fire,” it is as if I have found a label to attach to that moment, when I remained in the house with The Moth, and barely moved away from that gas fire.

  He tried persuading me to eat with him. When I refused he opened up two cans of sardines. Two plates—one for him, one for me. We sat by the fire. He joined me in the darkness, in the small fall of red gaslight. I remember now what we spoke of with confusion, with no chronology. It was as if he were attempting to explain or break open something that I did not know about yet.

  “Where is my father?”

  “I’ve had no communication with him.”

  “But my mother was joining him.”

  “No.” He paused a moment, thinking how to proceed. “You must believe me, she isn’t there with him.”

  “But she is his wife.”

  “I’m aware of that, Nathaniel.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No.”

  “Is she in danger? Where’s Rachel gone?”

  “I’ll find Rachel. Let her be for a moment.”

  “I don’t feel safe.”

  “I am staying here with you.”

  “Till our mother comes back?”

  “Yes.”

  A silence. I wanted to get up and walk away.

  “Do you remember the cat?”

  “No.”

  “You had a cat once.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  I was silent, out of politeness. I never had a cat. I don’t like cats.

  “I avoid them,” I said.

  “I know,” The Moth said. “Why is that, do you think? That you avoid them?”

  The gas fire sputtered and The Moth got on his knees and put a coin in the meter to revive it. The flames lit the left side of his face. He stayed as he was, as if he knew when he leaned back he would be in darkness again, as if he wanted me to see him, keep the contact intimate.

  “You had a cat,” he said again. “You loved it. It was the only pet you had when you were a child. It was small. It would wait for you to come home. One doesn’t remember everything. Do you remember your very first school? Before you moved to Ruvigny Gardens?” I shook my head, watching his eyes. “You loved the cat. At night, when you fell asleep, it seemed to sing to itself. But it was really a howl, not a beautiful sound, but it liked to do this. It irritated your father. He was a light sleeper. In the last war he took on a fear of sudden noises. Your cat’s howling drove him mad. You were all living in the outskirts of London then. Tulse Hill, I think. Around there.”

  “How do you know this?”

  He seemed not to hear me.

  “Yes, Tulse Hill. What does that mean? Tulse? Your father used to warn you. Do you remember? He would come into your room that was next to his and your mother’s and take the cat and put it outside for the rest of the night. But this made it worse. It would only sing louder. Your father did not think it was singing, of course. Only you did. That is what you told him. The thing was, the cat would not start its howling until you were asleep, as if it did not want to disturb you while you were beginning to fall asleep. So your father killed it one night.”

  I did not avert my eyes from the fire. The Moth leaned even closer into the light so I had to see his face, that it was human, even though it looked as though it was burning.

  “In the morning you couldn’t find your cat, and so he told you. He said he was sorry but he could not stand the noise.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You ran away from home.”

  “Where? Where did I go?”

  “You went to a friend of your parents’. You told that friend that you wanted to live there instead.”

  A silence.

  “He was brilliant, your father, but he was not stable. You must understand that the war damaged him badly. And it was not only his fear of sudden noise. There was a secrecy about him, and he needed to be alone. Your mother was aware of that. Perhaps she should have told you. Wars are not glorious.”

  “How do you know all this? How do you know?”

  “I was told,” he said.

  “Who told you? Who…” And then I stopped.

  “It was me you came to stay with. You told me.”

  We were both quiet then. The Moth stood up and moved back from the fire until I could barely see his face in the darkness. So it felt easier to talk.

  “How long did I stay with you?”

  “Not very long. Eventually I had to take you home. Remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You did not speak for some time. You felt safer that way.”

  * * *

  —

  My sister didn’t return until late that night, long past midnight. She appeared unconcerned, barely spoke to us. The Moth did not argue with her about her absence, only asked if she had been drinking. She shrugged. She looked exhausted, her arms and her legs were filthy. After this night The Moth would intentionally grow close to her. But it felt to me that she had crossed a river and was now further from me, elsewhere. She had after all been the one to discover the trunk, which our mother had simply “forgotten” when she’d boarded the plane for the two-and-a-half-day journey to Singapore. No shawl, no cannister, no calf-length dress she could swirl in on some dance floor during a tea dance with our father, or whoever she was with, wherever she was. But Rachel refused to talk about it.

  Mahler put the word schwer beside certain passages in his musical scores. Meaning “difficult.” “Heavy.” We were told this at some point by The Moth, as if it was a warning. He said we needed to prepare for such moments in order to deal with them efficiently, in case we suddenly had to take control of our wits. Those times exist for all of us, he kept saying. Just as no score relies on only one pitch or level of effort from musicians in the orchestra. Sometimes it relies on silence. It was a strange warning to be given, to accept that nothing was safe anymore. “ ‘Schwer,’ ” he’d say, with his fingers gesturing the inverted commas, and we’d mouth the word and then the translation, or simply nod in weary recognition. My sister and I got used to parroting the word back to each other—“schwer.”

  * * *

  There are times these years later, as I write all this down, when I feel as if I do so by candlelight. As if I cannot see what is taking place in the dark beyond the movement of this pencil. These feel like moments without context. Picasso as a youth, I’m told, painted only in candlelight, to admit the altering movement of shadows. But as a boy, I sat at my desk and drew detailed maps radiating out to the rest of the world. All children do this. But I did this as precisely as I could: our U-shaped street, the shops on Lower Richmond Road, the footpaths beside the Thames, the exact length of Putney Bridge (seven hundred feet), the height of the brick wall at the Brompton Cemetery (twenty feet), ending with the Gaumont cinema at a corner of Fulham Road. I did this each week, making sure of any new alteration as if what was not recorded might be in danger. I n
eeded a safe zone. I knew if I put two of those homemade maps beside each other they would look like a newspaper quiz where you had to find ten things that were different between two seemingly identical panels—the time on a clock, a jacket unbuttoned, this time a cat, this time no cat.

  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.

  Before half-term, The Moth proposed that if I wished to earn a little money he probably could arrange a job during the coming holiday. I nodded cautiously.

  “The Sinister Benevolence of the Lift Boy”

  There were nine giant laundry tubs revolving endlessly in the basement of the Criterion. It was a grey universe, windowless, separate from any daylight. I was with Tim Cornford and a man named Tolroy, heaving in tablecloths, and when the machines stopped we dragged them across the room onto other machines that pounded them flat with steam. Whatever we wore was heavy with dampness, and before loading the ironed tablecloths onto trolleys to roll them down the hall, we stripped and ran our clothes through the wringers.

  On my first day I thought that when I got home I would tell Rachel everything about what it had been like. But in the end I kept it all to myself—at first it was just the way I was embarrassed by the pains in my shoulders and legs, or the rush of pleasure I had had eating a stolen trifle I’d lifted off the coming evening’s dessert trolley. All I did when I got home was crawl into bed, leaving my still-wet clothes drying on the bannister. I’d been thrown into an exhausting pond life and now rarely saw my guardian, who was kept busy at the hub of a thousand spokes. At home he refused to listen to even an approach of a complaint by me. How I behaved or was treated at work did not concern him.

  I was offered the chance of night work at pay and a half and leapt for it. I became a lift jockey, bored, invisible in my velvet-lined carriage, and another evening wore a white jacket and worked in the bathrooms, pretending to be essential to guests who really had no need of me at all. Tips were welcomed, but those evenings were tipless and I would not be home before midnight, then up again at six. No, I preferred the laundry. Once, past midnight, after some party had ended, I was told I was needed to help with the transportation of artworks out from the cellar.
Significant sculptures and paintings had apparently been transported out of London during the war and hidden in Welsh slate mines. Lesser works were housed in the basements of large hotels and temporarily forgotten, but now they were being gradually lifted back into the light.

  None of us really knew how far the tunnels under the Criterion stretched, they may even have travelled under Piccadilly Circus, but down there was unbearable heat and the night staff worked almost naked as they wrestled those similarly naked statues out from the dark. My job was to work the manual lift in order to deliver these men and women, some with missing limbs, some lying in state with dogs at their feet or wrestling a stag, from our labyrinth of tunnels up to the foyer, and for a while the main lobby would appear as it did during the busiest hours of guest arrivals, a queue of dust-covered saints, some with arrows in their armpits, courteously lined up, as if waiting to register. I stroked the midriff of a goddess as I reached past her to pivot the brass handle so we could travel up one floor, barely able to move in the limited space of that service lift. Then I pulled open the grille and they all drifted away on skids into the Great Hall. So many saints and heroes I never knew. By dawn they were travelling towards various museums and private collections in the city.

  At the end of that short break I carefully studied my reflection in the school bathroom mirror to see if I had changed or learned anything, then returned to mathematics and the geography of Brazil.

  * * *

  —

  Rachel and I often competed over who could best imitate The Darter. He had for instance a furtive walk, as if he were saving energy for a later moment. (Maybe he’s waiting for the “schwer,” Rachel said.) My sister, always the better performer, could make it look as if she were scurrying to evade a searchlight. Unlike The Moth, The Darter was dedicated to quickness. He appeared most at ease in a limited space. After all, he had found early success as The Pimlico Darter, crouching in the modest square of a boxing ring, and we believed, unfairly, that at some point he may have spent a few months of his life in the similarly restricted nine by six feet of a prison cell.