Warlight
I could not remember the last time my mother had touched me. I was never sure whether she was going to teach me or brutalize me during those tournaments. At times she looked insecure, a woman from an earlier decade, mortal. It felt like a stage set. Something about those nights allowed me to focus on just her across our table in the semi-darkness—even if I knew she was the distraction. I saw how quick her hands were, how her eyes were interested only in what I was thinking. It seemed to both of us there was no one else in the world.
At the end of that game, before retiring, though I knew she would be up a few more hours on her own, she set up the chess board again. “This is the first game I memorized, Nathaniel. This is the game in the opera house I told you about.” She stood over the board and played both hands, one hand white, one hand black. Once or twice she waited, to let me suggest a move. “No, this!” she’d say, not with irritation at my choice, but with wonder at the master’s move. “You see, he went here with the bishop.” She kept moving her hands faster and faster, until all of the blacks were overcome.
It had taken me a while to realize that I would in some way have to love my mother in order to understand who she now was and what she had really been. This was difficult. I noticed, for instance, that she did not like leaving me alone in the house. She avoided going out if I decided to remain indoors, as if she suspected me of wishing to rummage through whatever of hers was private. This was my mother! I mentioned this to her once and she was so embarrassed I pulled back and apologized before she needed to defend herself. I would later discover she was someone adept in the theatre of war, but I felt the response was not a performance. The only time she revealed something of herself was to show me a few pictures that her parents had kept in a brown envelope in their bedroom. There was the serious schoolgirl face of my seventeen-year-old mother under our lime-tree bower, as well as photographs of her with her strong-willed mother and a tall man, sometimes with a parrot on his shoulder. He had a recognizable presence and reappeared in a handful of later pictures with my mother, slightly older, and her parents at the Casanova Revue Bar in Vienna—I was able to read the name on the large ashtray on the table, next to the dozen or so empty wineglasses. But otherwise there was nothing at White Paint that gave away anything about her adult life. If I were Telemachus I would find no proof of her activities as that disappeared parent, no evidence of those journeys of hers on wine-dark seas.
Most of the time we puttered about, staying out of each other’s way. I was relieved to go off to work each morning, even on Saturdays. Then one evening, after one of our light suppers, I became conscious of my mother’s restlessness, and that she was clearly eager to get out of the house even with the possibility of oncoming rain. Grey clouds had been above us all day.
“Come. Will you walk with me?”
I didn’t want to, and I could have pushed it, but I decided to go along and was greeted with an actual smile. “I’ll tell you more about that game at the opera,” she said. “Bring a coat. It will rain. We don’t want that to turn us back.” She locked the door and we headed west onto one of the hills.
How old was she around that time? Perhaps forty? I was now eighteen. She had married young, the habit and fashion of the time, though she had studied languages at university, and once told me she had wished to take a law degree. But gave that up and instead raised two children. She was in her early thirties, so still youthful, when war started and she began working as a signals operative. Now she was striding beside me in her yellow slicker.
“Paul Morphy was his name. It was October 21, 1858….”
“Okay. Paul Morphy,” I said, as if ready for the second serve she was about to send over the net.
“Okay.” She half laughed. “And I will only tell you this once. He was born in New Orleans, a prodigy. At twelve he beat a Hungarian grand master who was traveling across Louisiana. The parents wanted him to become a lawyer but he gave that up and followed the game. And the greatest match in his life was the one played in the Italian Opera House in Paris against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard—who are remembered for only one reason, that they were beaten by this twenty-one-year-old.” I was smiling to myself. All these titles! I still remembered Agnes naming one of the dogs who had eaten her dinner in Mill Hill the “Earl of Sandwich.”
“But it was also the situation and location where the game was played that made them all famous, as if it were a scene in an Austro-Hungarian novel or an adventure like Scaramouche. The three players were sitting in the Duke of Brunswick’s private box, practically above the stage. They could have leaned down and kissed the prima donna. And it was the opening night of Bellini’s Norma, or The Infanticide.
“Morphy had never seen Norma and was eager to witness the performance for he simply loved music. He was sitting with his back to the stage, so he’d play quickly, then turn back to the footlights. Perhaps that’s what made it a masterpiece, each move being a fast sketch in the sky, barely touching the reality of earth. His opponents would debate among themselves and make a tentative move. Morphy would turn, glance at the board, push forward a pawn or a knight, and return to the opera. His clock time during the whole game was probably less than a minute. It was inspired, it is still inspired, still considered one of the remarkable games. He was playing White.
“So the game begins with the Philidor Defence, a passive opening for Black. Morphy is not interested in taking black pieces in the early stages, preferring to mass his forces for a quick checkmate so he can get back to the opera. Meanwhile the theoretical discussions by his opponents grow louder and louder, irritating the audience and the lead singer, Madame Rosina Penco, who is playing the High Priestess Norma and keeps flinging her stare towards the Duke’s box. Morphy brings out his queen and a bishop, working together to dominate the centre of the board, forcing Black into a tight defensive position.”
My mother turned in the darkness and looked at me. “Are you following the game on the board?”
“I am following it,” I said.
“Black is very soon in shambles. Now it is intermission. Everything has been occurring on stage—romantic love, jealousy, a wish to murder, notable arias. Norma has been abandoned and decides to kill her children. And all the while the audience has been watching the Duke of Brunswick’s box!
“In Act Two the plot continues. The black pieces are idle, pinned to their king, the knights frozen by Morphy’s bishops. Are you following?”
“Yes, yes.”
“Morphy now brings a rook into the attack down the centre of the board. He makes a series of sensational sacrifices in order to squeeze Black into an increasingly hopeless position. And he follows with the stylish queen sacrifice I showed you the other night that will quickly lead to mate. By the time the climax of the opera occurs, when the Consul and Norma decide to die together in a funeral pyre, Morphy can give all his attention to the music, leaving his opponents in ruins.”
“Wow,” I say.
“Please don’t say ‘Wow.’ You were only in America a few months.”
“It’s an expressive word.”
“Beginning with that Philidor Defence, it was as if Morphy had invented a great philosophical profundity on his way to the opera. That happens, of course, when you are not looking at yourself too carefully. And it happened that night. It is almost a hundred years later, and that little move in the shadows, across the footlights from Norma, is still recognized as genius.”
“What happened to him?”
“He retired from chess and became a lawyer, but was no good at it so he lived off the family money till he died, in his forties. Never played chess again, but he had his moment, with exceptional music.”
We looked at each other, we were both soaked. I had been conscious of the rain at first, then forgotten it. We stood by the entrance to a copse and far below us was our lit white-painted house. I sensed that she was happier here than she
would ever be in that secure warmth. Here, where we were no longer housebound, there was an energy and lightness in her I rarely saw. We walked under the cold darkness of the trees. She had no wish to turn back, and we were there for some time, barely talking, private. This is how she must have appeared to others she worked with, I thought, during her silent wars, in the midst of those unknown contests.
* * *
My mother has heard from Mr. Malakite that a stranger has moved into a house a few miles from White Paint and has been uncommunicative as to where he is from as well as what his profession is.
She hikes alongside Rumburgh Wood, passes the moat farms southwest of the village of St. James, until she is in visual distance of the man’s house. It’s early evening. She waits until all the lights go out, then another hour. Finally she returns home through the darkness. The next day she appears again a quarter of a mile away, and watches the similar lack of activity. Until the gaunt man emerges in the late afternoon. She follows him cautiously. He circles the perimeter of the old aerodrome. He is going nowhere, really, she can tell that, he’s just on a ramble, but she stays with him until he returns home. Once more she waits in the same field, past the hour when nearly all of his lights are out. She makes her way closer to the house, changes her mind, and turns for home, again torchless in the dark.
She has a tentative chat the next day with the postman. “Do you talk with him when you deliver the mail?”
“Not really. He’s a scarce one. Doesn’t even come to the door.”
“What kind of mail does he get? Does he get a lot?”
“Well, I’m not allowed to say.”
“Really?” She almost laughs at him.
“Well. Books often. Once or twice a package from the Caribbean.”
“What else?”
“Apart from books, I’m not sure.”
“Does he have a dog?”
“No.”
“Interesting.”
“Do you?” he asks.
“No.”
The conversation has not been of much use to her, and she ends the chat, which the postman by now seems eager to pursue. Later, with official help, she is able to discover what exactly is being delivered to the stranger, along with what he is mailing out. As well as the fact he comes from the Caribbean, where his grandparents were indentured servants at a sugar plantation in the British colony there. It turns out he is some sort of writer, apparently quite well known, even in other parts of the world.
She learns to pronounce and repeat the stranger’s name to herself, as if it is a rare imported flower.
* * *
“When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….”
Rose had written this in one of her spare journals I found after her death. As if even in the privacy of her home, even in a secret notebook, she needed to be careful with the revelation of a possibility. She may even have muttered it mantra-like to herself. When he comes, he will be like an Englishman….
The past—my mother knew more than anyone—never remains in the past. So in the privacy of that notebook, in her home, in her own country, she knew she was still a target. She must have assumed that would be the disguise a person bent on vengeance would have to adopt in order to enter the depths of Suffolk and reach her without suspicion. The only clue to a motive would be that he would probably come from a zone of Europe where she had once worked, and where questionable decisions of war had been made. “Who do you think is going to come for you someday?” I would have asked her, if I had known. “What did you do that was so terrible?” And she would, I think, have said, “My sins are various.”
* * *
—
She admitted to me once that my shadowy father had been better than anyone at building levees and firewalls against the past.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Asia, perhaps?” The answer evasive. “He was a damaged man. We went our separate ways.” She swept her hand horizontally, as if wiping a table clean. My father, who had not been seen by us since that long-ago evening when he boarded the Avro Tudor.
A changeling discovers his own bloodline. So I was never to know him as well as I knew The Darter or The Moth. It was as if the two of them were in a book I was reading in my father’s absence and they would be the ones I learned from. I desired unstoppable adventures with them, or even a romance with a girl in a cafeteria who might fade from my life unless I acted, insisted. Because that was what fate was.
* * *
—
For a few days I tried breaking into other archives in the hope of discovering some presence of my father. But there was no evidence of him in any capacity, at home or abroad. Either there was no record of him there or his identity was more deeply classified. For this was a place where altitude took over, the higher echelons of the seven-storey building disappearing into a mist that had long ago cut its ties with the everyday world. A part of me wished to believe that here was where my father still existed, if anywhere. Not in some far reach of the empire, monitoring the Japanese military surrender, and going loco from heat, insects, the general complexity of post-war life in Asia. Perhaps all that was a blind fiction, like that promotion of his in the Far East, as opposed to what I wanted to imagine him doing, nearer to home—the evasive, smoke-like man, never referred to; not even, it seemed, existing in print.
For remembering how my father had a few times let me accompany him to his office in the city before his departure, showing me the large map where his various business dealings existed, the coastal harbours, and discreetly hidden island empires, I wondered if such offices had also served as intelligence centres during the war. Where was that office building in which my father explained how his company imported tea and rubber from the colonies, and where a lit map revealed a bird’s-eye view of the economic and political terrain of his universe? It may have been this very place for all I knew, or some other location that had once housed similar covert activities. What role did my father really have in the office he took me to when I was a boy? Because in such establishments I have discovered that the height of the floor means power. And that building reminds me now of nothing so much as the Criterion, where some of us worked in the basement laundries and steam-filled kitchens, never allowed to enter the higher reaches of the building, instead winnowed like fish at the gates and ladders so no one got higher than banquet halls and then only by putting on the disguise of a servile uniform. Had I already been in one of those cloud-hidden office heights with my father in my youth?
Once, almost as a joke or a quiz, I wrote a list of possible fates of our father, and sent it to Rachel.
Strangled in Johor.
Strangled on board a ship on his way to the Sudan.
Permanently AWOL.
Permanently undercover, but active.
In retirement at a facility in Wimbledon, paranoia invading him, constantly irritated by sounds coming from a nearby animal hospital.
Still on the top floor of the Unilever building.
I never heard back from her.
So many unlabelled splinters in my memory. In my grandparents’ bedroom, I had been shown formal pictures of my mother as a student but there was not one of my father. Even after her death, when I scurried around White Paint to discover whatever clues I could find of her life and death, I came across no photographic evidence of him. All I knew was that the political maps of his era were vast and coastal and I would never know if he was close to us or had disappeared into one of those distances forever, a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.
A Nightingale Floor
There was no coverage of my mother’s death in the newspapers. The death of Rose Williams caused little public response in the larger world she had once belonged in. Her small obituary identified her only as the daughter of an admiral, and did not mention a location for her
funeral. There was, unfortunately, mention of her death in The Mint Light.
Rachel was not at her funeral. I tried reaching her when I was given the news, but there was no reply to my telegram. Still, there were a surprising number of people from out of town who attended, people I assumed my mother had worked with in earlier days. This in spite of the secrecy of the location.
She was buried not in the village near to us, but some fifteen miles away in the parish of Benacre in the Waveney district. It was there her funeral took place. My mother was not religious, but she had loved the simple bearing of that church. Whoever had organized the service must have known that.
It was an afternoon funeral. The chosen time allowed those who had come from London to catch the nine a.m. train from Liverpool Street and return afterwards on the late-afternoon train back to the city. Who, I wondered, as I looked at the group gathered around the grave, had planned all this? Who had chosen the line for her gravestone, “I have travel’d thro’ Perils & Darkness not unlike a Champion.” When I asked the Malakites they claimed they did not know, though Mrs. Malakite thought it had all been done efficiently and tastefully. There were no journalists among the gathered, and those who came by car had the vehicles wait a few hundred yards from the graveyard’s entrance so no attention was drawn towards them. I must have appeared distant in my grief for my mother. I had been given the news at college just the previous day and the anonymous mourners no doubt regarded the eighteen-year-old boy by the grave as parentless and adrift. One of them did, at the end, come over and wordlessly shake my hand as if this were adequate consolation, before continuing his slow thoughtful walk out of the graveyard.
I spoke to no one. Another gentleman approached me and said, “Your mother was a remarkable woman,” and I did not even look up. In retrospect it was rude, but he had come to me as I was looking into the grave, at her narrow coffin in the fit of the earth. I was thinking the coffin maker and whoever had ordered it must have known how especially thin Rose Williams was. And known how she would have liked the black cherrywood, known that the chosen words of the service would not have appalled her or been ironic to her, and might have even chosen the line by Blake for the gravestone. So I was looking at what was three or four feet below me and thinking of all that when I heard the man’s quiet, almost shy voice speak. “Your mother was a remarkable woman.” And by the time I came to an awareness of courtesy, the tall man whom I had not acknowledged but who had respected whatever privacy I was in had moved away and I saw him only from behind.