Warlight Read online

  Did other mothers do this? Did they fall gasping over the sofa with a flung dagger in their backs? None of this would she do if The Moth was about. But why did she do it at all? Was she bored with looking after us on a daily basis? Did dressing up or dressing down make her another, not just our mother? Best of all, when first light slipped into our rooms, we’d enter her bedroom like tentative dogs and gaze at her undressed face, the closed eyes, the white shoulders and arms already stretched out to gather us in. For, whatever the hour, she was always awake, ready for us. We never surprised her. “Come here, Stitch. Come here, Wren,” she would murmur, her personal nicknames for us. I suspect that was the time Rachel and I felt we had a real mother.

  In early September the steamer trunk was brought out of the basement and we watched as she filled it with frocks, shoes, necklaces, English fiction, maps, along with objects and equipment she said she did not expect to find in the East, even what looked like some unnecessary woollens, for she told us the evenings were often “brisk” in Singapore. She made Rachel read out loud from a Baedeker about the terrain and the bus services, as well as the local terminology for “Enough!” or “More,” and “How far is it?” We recited the phrases out loud with our clichéd accents of the East.

  Maybe she believed that the specifics and calmness of packing a large trunk would assure us of the sanity of her journey rather than make us feel even more bereft. It was almost as if we expected her to climb into that black wooden trunk, so much like a coffin with those brass corner edges, and be deported away from us. It took several days, this act of packing, and felt slow and fateful in its activity, like an endless ghost story. Our mother was about to be altered. She would evolve into something invisible to us. Perhaps for Rachel it felt different. She was more than a year older. It may have looked theatrical to her. But for me the act of continual reconsidering and repacking suggested a permanent disappearance. Prior to our mother’s leaving, the house had been our cave. Only a few times did we walk along the embankment of the river. She said that travel was something she would be doing too much of in the coming weeks.

  Then suddenly she had to leave, for some reason sooner than expected. My sister went into the bathroom and painted her face a blank white, then knelt with that emotionless face at the top of the stairs and circled her arms through the railings and would not let go. By the front door I joined our mother in an argument against Rachel, attempting to persuade her to come downstairs. It was as if our mother had arranged things so there would be no tearful goodbyes.

  There’s a photograph I have of my mother in which her features are barely revealed. I recognize her from just her stance, some gesture in her limbs, even though it was taken before I was born. She is seventeen or eighteen, and snapped by her parents along the banks of their Suffolk river. She has been swimming, has climbed into her dress, and now stands on one foot, the other leg bent sideways in order to put on a shoe, her head tilted down so that her blond hair covers her face. I found it years later in the spare bedroom among the few remnants she had decided not to throw away. I have it with me still. This almost anonymous person, balanced awkwardly, holding on to her own safety. Already incognito.

  * * *

  In mid-September we arrived at our respective schools. Having been day students so far, we were unaccustomed to boardingschool life, whereas everyone there already knew they had been essentially abandoned. We could not stand it and within a day of our arrival wrote to our parents care of a mailbox address in Singapore, pleading to be released. I worked out that our letter would travel in a van to the Southampton docks, then make its way by ship, reaching and then leaving distant ports without any sense of urgency. At that distance and after six weeks I already knew our list of complaints would appear meaningless. For instance, the fact that I had to walk down three flights of stairs in darkness in order to find a bathroom at night. Most of the regular boarders usually pissed into one selected sink on our floor, beside the one where you brushed your teeth. This had been the custom at the school for generations—and decades of urine had worn a clear path in the one enamel basin used for this activity. But one night while I was drowsily relieving myself into the sink, the Housemaster strolled past and witnessed what I was doing. At assembly the next morning he made an outraged speech about the despicable act he had stumbled upon, going on to claim that even during the four years he had fought in the war he had never witnessed anything so obscene. The shocked silence among the boys in the hall was in fact disbelief that the Housemaster was unaware of a tradition that had been in existence when Shackleton and P. G. Wodehouse had been great men at the school (although one of them was rumoured to have been expelled, and the other knighted only after much disagreement). I too hoped to be expelled but was simply beaten by a prefect, who could not stop laughing. In any case, I did not expect a considered reply from my parents, even after including the postscript of my crime in a quickly written second letter. I clung to the hope that becoming a boarder at school had been our father’s idea more than our mother’s, so she might be our chance of release.

  Our schools were half a mile away from each other and the only communication possible between us was to borrow a bicycle and meet on the Common. Rachel and I decided that whatever we did we would do together. So in the midst of the second week, before our pleading letters had even reached Europe, we slipped away with the day students after the last class, hung around Victoria Station till evening, when we were sure The Moth would be home to let us in, and returned to Ruvigny Gardens. We both knew The Moth was the one adult who seemed to have our mother’s ear.

  “Ah, you could not wait for the weekend, is that it?” was all he said. There was a thin man sitting in the armchair my father always sat in.

  “This is Mr. Norman Marshall. He used to be the best welterweight north of the river, known as ‘The Pimlico Darter.’ You may have heard of him?”

  We shook our heads. We were more concerned that The Moth had invited someone we did not know into our parents’ home. We’d never considered such a possibility. We were also nervous about our escape from the school and how it would be taken by our untested guardian. But for some reason our midweek escape did not concern The Moth.

  “You must be hungry. I’ll warm up some baked beans. How did you get here?”

  “The train. Then the bus.”

  “Good.” And with that he walked into the kitchen, leaving us with The Pimlico Darter.

  “Are you his friend?” Rachel asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “That’s my father’s chair,” I said.

  He ignored me and turned towards Rachel. “He wished me to come here, sweetheart. He’s considering a dog at Whitechapel this weekend. Ever been there?”

  Rachel was silent, as if she had not been spoken to. He was not even a friend of our lodger. “Cat got your tongue?” he inquired of her, then turned his pale blue eyes towards me. “Been to a dog race?” I shook my head, and then The Moth returned.

  “Here you are. Two plates of beans.”

  “They’ve never been to a dog race, Walter.”

  Walter?

  “I should bring them this Saturday. What time’s your race?”

  “The O’Meara Cup is always three p.m.”

  “These kids sometimes can get out on weekends, if I write a note.”

  “Actually…” Rachel said. The Moth turned towards her and waited for her to continue.

  “We don’t want to go back.”

  “Walter, I’m off. Looks like you’ve got a complication.”

  “Oh, no complication,” said The Moth breezily. “We can sort it out. Don’t forget the signal. I don’t want my coins put on a useless dog.”

  “Right. Right…” The Darter rose, put a reassuring hand rather strangely on my sister’s shoulder and left the three of us alone.

  We a
te the beans and our guardian watched us without any sense of judgement.

  “I’ll ring the school and tell them not to worry. They’re no doubt shitting a brick or two right now.”

  “I’m supposed to have a maths test first thing tomorrow,” I said, coming clean.

  “He was nearly expelled for urinating in a sink!” Rachel said.

  Whatever authority The Moth had he used with quick diplomacy, accompanying us back to school early the next morning and speaking for thirty minutes to the Master, a short, terrifying man who always moved silently down the halls in crepe-soled shoes. It shocked me that the man who usually ate street meals on Bigg’s Row had this authority. In any case, I went back into my class that morning as a day boy, and The Moth took Rachel down the road to her school to negotiate the other half of the problem. So in our second week we became day students again. We did not even consider how our parents were going to feel about this radical resettlement of our lives.

  Under The Moth’s care, we began eating most of our dinners from the local street barrows. Bigg’s Row, since the Blitz, remained an untravelled road. A few years earlier, some time after Rachel and I had been evacuated to live with our grandparents in Suffolk, a bomb probably intended for Putney Bridge had landed and exploded on the High Street, a quarter of a mile from Ruvigny Gardens. The Black & White Milk Bar and the Cinderella Dance Club were destroyed. Nearly a hundred had been killed. It was a night with what our grandmother called “a bomber’s moon”—the city, towns, and villages in blackout but the land below clear in the moonlight. Even after we returned to Ruvigny Gardens at war’s end, many of the streets in our area were still partly rubble, and along Bigg’s Row three or four barrows carried food cycled out from the centre of the city—whatever had not been used by West End hotels. It was rumoured The Moth was involved with steering some of that leftover produce into neighbourhoods south of the river.

  Neither of us had eaten from a barrow before, but it became our regular fare—our guardian had no interest in cooking or even being cooked for. He preferred, he said, “a hasty life.” So we would stand with him almost every evening alongside a female opera singer or local tailors and upholsterers with tools still attached to their belts, as they discussed and argued over the day’s news. The Moth was more animated on the street, the eyes behind his spectacles taking in everything. Bigg’s Row appeared to be his real home, his theatre, where he seemed most at ease, whereas my sister and I felt we were trespassers.

  In spite of his gregarious manner during those outdoor meals, The Moth kept to himself. His feelings were rarely offered to us. Apart from some curious questions—he kept asking me casually about the art gallery that was a part of my school and whether I could draw its floor plan for him—as with his war experiences he kept silent about his interests. He was not really at ease speaking to the young. “Listen to this….” His eyes looked up momentarily from the newspaper spread out on our dining room table. ‘Mr. Rattigan was overheard saying that le vice anglais is not pederasty or flagellation, but the inability of the English to express emotion.’ ” He stopped and waited for some response from us.

  We thought, during our confidently opinionated teens, that women were not likely to be attracted to The Moth. My sister made a list of his attributes. Thick black horizontal eyebrows. A large though friendly stomach. His big honker. For a private man who loved classical music, and who drifted through the house mostly in silence, he had the loudest sneezes. Bursts of air were expelled not just from his face but seemed to originate from the depths of that large and friendly stomach. Then three or four more sneezes would immediately follow, crashing loudly. Late at night, they could be heard, fully articulate, travelling down from his attic rooms as if he were some trained actor whose stage whispers could reach the furthest row.

  Most evenings he sat and grazed through Country Life, peering at the pictures of stately homes, all the while sipping what seemed to be milk from a blue thimble-like glass. For a person who spoke so disapprovingly of the advance of capitalism, The Moth had an inflamed curiosity about aristocracy. The place he was most curious about was the Albany, which one entered through a secluded courtyard off Piccadilly, and he once murmured, “I’d love to wander around there.” It was a rare admission of criminal desire in him.

  He usually disappeared from us at sunrise and was gone till dusk. On Boxing Day, knowing I had nothing to do, The Moth took me along with him to Piccadilly Circus. By seven a.m. I was walking beside him in the thick-carpeted lobby of the Criterion’s Banquet Halls, where he oversaw the daily work of the mostly immigrant staff. With the war over, there seemed to be a surge of celebrations. And within half an hour The Moth had set up their various duties—the vacuuming of hallways, the soaping and drying of stair carpets, varnishing of bannisters, the transporting of a hundred used tablecloths down to the basement laundry. And depending on the size of the banquet that was to occur that evening—a reception for a new member of the House of Lords, a bar mitzvah, a debutante ball, or some dowager’s last pre-death birthday party—he choreographed the staff into transforming the immense empty banquet rooms in an evolving time-lapse, until they eventually contained a hundred tables and six hundred chairs for the night’s festivities.

  Sometimes The Moth had to be present at those evening events, moth-like in the shadows of the half-lit periphery of the gilded room. But it was clear he preferred the early-morning hours, when the staff who would never be seen by the evening’s guests worked mural-like in the thirty-yard-long crowded Great Hall that raged with giant vacuum cleaners, with men on ladders holding thirty-foot whisks to pluck cobwebs off chandeliers, and wood polishers who disguised the odours from the previous night. Nothing could be more unlike my father’s deserted offices. This was more like a train station where every passenger had a purpose. I climbed a narrow metal staircase to where the arc lights hung, waiting to be turned on for the hours of dancing, and looked down seeing them all; and in the midst of this great human sea, the large figure of The Moth sat alone at one of the hundred round dinner tables, with that pleasure of chaos around him as he filled out worksheets, knowing somehow where everyone was or should be in the five-storey building. All morning he organized the silver polishers and cake decorators, the oilers of trolley wheels and lift gates, the lint and vomit removers, the replacers of soap at each sink, the replacers of chlorine medallions in the urinals, and the men hosing the pavement outside the entrance, as well as immigrants who squeezed out English names they had never spelled before onto birthday cakes, diced up onions, slashed open pigs with terrible knives, or prepared whatever else would be desired twelve hours later in the Ivor Novello Room or the Miguel Invernio Room.

  We slipped out of the building promptly at three that afternoon, and The Moth disappeared and I went home alone. Sometimes he returned to the Criterion in the evenings to deal with emergencies, but whatever my guardian did from three p.m. until he returned to Ruvigny Gardens was not to be known. He was a man of many doors. Were there other professions he nestled into, even briefly for an hour or two? An honourable charity or some upheaval of order? A person we met hinted that for two afternoons of the week he worked with the Semitic and radical International Tailors, Machinists and Pressers Union. But that was perhaps a fabrication, such as his activities as a fire watcher with the Home Guard during the war. The roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel, I’ve since discovered, had simply been the best location for clear transmission of radio broadcasts to Allied troops behind enemy lines in Europe. It was where The Moth had first worked with our mother. We had once hung on to these wisps of stories of them in the war, yet after she left, The Moth retreated and kept such anecdotes at a distance from us.

  Hell-Fire

  At the end of that first winter, while we were living with The Moth, Rachel made me follow her down to the basement, and there, under a tarpaulin and several boxes that she had pulled away, was our mother’s steamer trunk. Not in Singapor
e at all, but here. It seemed an act of magic, as if the trunk had returned to the house after its journey. I said nothing. I climbed the stairs out of the cellar. I feared, I suppose, we would find her body there, pressed against all those clothes so carefully folded and packed. The door slammed as Rachel left the house.

  I was in my room when The Moth returned late at night. He said it had been a crisis evening at the Criterion. Usually he left us alone if we were in our rooms. This time there was a knock on my door and he came in.

  “You didn’t eat.”

  “I did,” I said.

  “You didn’t. There’s no evidence of that. I’ll cook you something.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Let me…”

  “No, thank you.”

  I would not look at him. He stayed where he was and didn’t say anything. Finally, “Nathaniel,” he said quietly. That was all. Then, “Where is Rachel?”

  “I don’t know. We found her trunk.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s here, isn’t it, Nathaniel.” I remember his precise wording, the repetition of my name. There was more silence; my ears may have been deaf to any sound, even if it existed. I remained hunched over. I don’t know how much later it was but he got me downstairs and we went into the basement and The Moth began to open the trunk.

  Inside, pressed, as if permanently and forever, were all the clothes and objects we had watched her pack so theatrically, each justified with an explanation of why she would need this specific calf-length dress or that shawl. She had to take the shawl, she had remarked, since we had given it to her for her birthday. And that cannister, she would need it there. And those casual shoes. Everything had a purpose and a usefulness. And everything had been left behind.